LUXEMBOURG .- Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean opened a major, new monographic exhibition of the early work of Robert Morris (b. 1931, Kansas City, Missouri; d. 2018, Kingston, New York). An important figure in the history of American sculpture after the Second World War, Morris was a chief proponent of Minimal, Postminimal and Conceptual art. This exhibition, which was conceived in dialogue with the artist before his death in 2018, offers a rare opportunity to view significant works of the 1960s and ’70s, including examples borrowed from major public and private collections as well as the artist’s estate.

Presented across seven spaces on two floors of the museum, Robert Morris. The Perceiving Body focuses on the artist’s experiments with form, process, and acts of beholding. The works included, dating from 1961 to 1977, are largely associated with Minimal and Postminimal Art, tendencies Morris also addressed-and helped to define-in his extensive theoretical writings of the period. Morris’s work is grounded in the significance of a direct or unmediated encounter with the sculptural object. With this in mind, the exhibition avoids the convention of the anthology or survey. Rather, large installations and discrete groups of related works have been selected to form a constellation of rooms each representing a separate but related aspect of the artist’s production during this period. Morris referred to his practice as a series of ‘investigations’. Indeed, through the application of principles such as permutation, repetition and chance, the works in the exhibition demonstrate both analytical precision and affective power.

The selection includes seminal objects such as Untitled (3Ls) (1965/1970), Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) (1965/1971) and Untitled (Ring with Light) (1965-66/1993), as well as a sequence of works made from industrial felt. On display will also be two large-scale works that each occupy an entire room. Untitled (Scatter Piece) (1968-69/2009), a work composed of 200 elements, half made from six kinds of metal and half from industrial felt, which were conceived and fabricated according to chance operations inspired by the composer John Cage (b. 1912, Los Angeles; d. 1992, New York). Their arrangement is not predetermined or fixed, but changes from one time to the next according to the choice of the installer. A second large installation, Untitled (Portland Mirrors) (1977), in which an arrangement of mirrors and timbers creates an uncanny illusion of imaginary space, will be shown in Mudam’s Grand Hall.

Robert Morris. The Perceiving Body includes works loaned from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, London, among others public and private collections. It is organised in collaboration with Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole (where it will be presented from June 6 to September 27, 2020.

Robert Morris (b. 1931, Kansas City, Missouri; d. 2018, Kingston, New York) is a major figure in the history of Minimal, Postminimal and Conceptual Art. He was also a prominent critical voiceduring this period, making a significant contribution to the theoretical discourse of art after 1960. His first exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1963 marked the emergence of Minimalism, a movement brought to broad public attention in the survey exhibition Primary Structures, presented at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, where Morris’s work was shown with sculpture by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, among others. Morris also made important contributions to the development of Land Art, Process Art, performance, and avant-garde film. His work has been the subject of large-scale monographic exhibitions at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (2011); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2009); Tate Modern, London (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2002); and Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon (2000).