NEW YORK, NY.- A prolonged fascination with the aerodynamics of machinery and vehicular shapes informs the refined form and vibrant color of Grosvenor’s recent sculpture. This exhibition follows Grosvenor’s participation in the 2022 Venice Biennale, where the artist installed three large-scale sculptures. One of these, an untitled work dated 2018, presented an orange scooter inside an industrial shipping container with a gold interior. This mesmerizing and subtly elusive work informed the artist’s new installation at Paula Cooper Gallery, which engages similar forms, materials, and ideas on an increased scale. 
 
A vibrant orange vehicle without wheels sits directly on the floor. Adjacent to the vehicle, ten bowling pins are arranged in the triangular formation typical of the game. Positioned such that half of the triangle is directly in front of the vehicle, the composition is both deliberate and ambiguous, imparting a distinct strangeness.
 
A series of photographs taken between 2000 and 2013 translates Grosvenor’s formal vocabulary into two-dimensional images of everyday life. As with his sculptures, the photographs blur the boundaries between found object and artwork, presenting a breadth of objects in striking, often comical, arrangements. Themes of automation, containment and architecture connect the images, which picture vehicles and structures so characteristic of Grosvenor that one wonders if he made them himself. The commanding horizontality, cropped perspectives and silhouetted subjects offer a compelling and uncanny alternate reality.

Known primarily as a sculptor, Robert Grosvenor (b. 1937, New York) has eluded artistic categorization during his more than fifty-year career, producing diverse, singular works that explore the spatial dynamics between object, architecture, and viewer. His work was included in the seminally important group exhibitions Primary Structures (Jewish Museum, 1966) and Minimal Art (Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, 1968), which helped define minimalism. He soon diverged from this movement to create challenging works that resist assimilation to any of the prevailing art movements. One-person exhibitions of Grosvenor’s work have been presented at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1992); the Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2005); the Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2017); and the ICA Miami (2019). Grosvenor’s work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Storm King Art Center, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Serralves Museum, Porto; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Grosvenor lives and works in Long Island, New York.