Robert Morris

b. Kansas City, MO, USA, 9 February 1931 ? d. Kingston, NY, USA, 28 November 2018

Robert Morris was one of the heavyweights of American Minimalism. In his writing as well as his sculptures, Morris proposed a vision of art which had been stripped back to simple geographic forms, free of any metaphorical significance, and which was designed to prioritise the way in which viewers interacted with the work, rather than its physical form. Morris ventured beyond the boundaries of radical aesthetic minimalism, and experimented with other forms of avant-garde art at the time, such as process art and land art. With his felt constructions, whose folds took on monumental proportions, the material determined the form, so inducing the artist to accept the unexpected. Curves were not always perfect, the material would slacken, and asymmetry reigned.

Many large exhibitions have been dedicated to Morris? artwork, notably at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994, and the Pompidou Centre (which hosted a retrospective on his work) in Paris the following year. His works feature among the collections of numerous institutions throughout Europe and the USA, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, and the Tate in London.