Almost 40 years ago, in 1980, Robert Morris’ first personal exhibition was held, curated by Ida Panicelli and dedicated to minimalist sculpture. Now, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea celebrates this artist fundamental to the history of contemporary art, a master of American Minimalism, of which he was one of the founders, and of process and land art, to mention just some of the great movements that his incredibly prolific and multi-directional research moved through in the course of some sixty years.
Robert Morris. Monumentum 2015–2018 curated by Saretto Cincinelli is the first exhibition to be dedicated to the artist since he passed away in November 2018, and it presents a series of works produced by Morris in the final years of his life, and never shown in Europe before. These are sculptures depicting human figures, belonging to the two series MOLTINGSEXOSKELETONSSHROUDS, made of Belgian linen soaked in resin and placed over models to take on their form, and Boustrophedons, in carbon fibre, exhibited respectively in 2015 and 2017 at the Castelli Gallery in New York. The unprecedented spatial relationship between the two series exhibited here at the Galleria Nazionale is the fruit of a design agreed with Morris himself before his passing.
Morris’ recent sculptural groups bear witness to the artist’s growing interest in the human figure, and in the work of the great masters of the past. This marks a shift in his formal vocabulary, which seems to be definitively released from the sense of order and abstraction typical of much of the American avant-garde, to move towards more emphatically Baroque and allegorical elements. In this exhibition, in addition to references to Donatello, we also see clear reverberations of Rodin, the later drawings of Francisco Goya, and the weeping statues of the Gothic sculptor Claus Sluter.
Using materials associated with painting, such as Belgian linen and varnish to form the shrouds of sculptural figures, Morris creates remarkable tension: between the apparent presence of the figures and their absence, between the idea of sculpture as an eminently spatial art and that of the groups of figures interacting together to reveal an almost pictorial approach, and finally, between the audience and their perception of each scene.
The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Castelli Gallery, New York.