Background
Robert Strawbridge Grosvenor was born on March 31, 1937 in New York, into the family of Ted Phinney and Anita (Strawbridge) Grosvenor.
Robert Strawbridge Grosvenor was born on March 31, 1937 in New York, into the family of Ted Phinney and Anita (Strawbridge) Grosvenor.
Robert Grosvenor studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1956 and the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in France during 1957 - 1959. Then he attended the Universitá di Perugia in Umbria, Italy.
Over his 50-year artistic career, Robert Grosvenor has produced a body of work that is at once solidly physical and conceptual, muscular and fluid. Grosvenor frequently uses industrial materials and found objects as he experiments with texture and scale, resulting in sculptures that reveal a handmade quality and subtle vein of humor. The works resist interpretation, instead quietly and strangely asserting themselves both as assemblages of relationships and as discrete, holistic entities. Critical reception and written accounts of his work over decades reflect an artist who has enamored his audience specifically for his ability to elude them.
Grosvenor began exhibiting in the 1960s and his work was prominently included in important exhibitions such as Primary Structures in Jewish Museum in 1966, and Minimal Art in Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in 1968, which helped define minimalism. In this career Grosvenor has followed his own distinct path, however, creating works that express his singular sensibility. The presentation at the Renaissance Society provides an opportunity to generate new scholarship around Grosvenor’s oeuvre, further strengthening recognition of his significant contributions to sculpture in the 20th, and now 21st, centuries.
Important one-person exhibitions of Grosvenor’s work have been presented at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1992 and the Fundação de Serralves, Porto, in 2005, and he participated in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. The artist currently lives and works in East Patchogue. Grosvenor’s work is included in the collections of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Storm King Art Center, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Serralves Museum, Porto.
Neither purity, nor art about art, have ever seemed to be a strong element in Grosvenor’s thinking, perhaps because he realized that it was a privileged position, and making art that comes out of that place was of little interest to him. At a time when many artists are claiming to make political or ecological art, Grosvenor eschews didacticism in favor of a gentle humor suffused with tragedy.
Quotations: “I like things I’ve seen very fast and I don’t remember what they are; but I remember the outline, the image. I’d like my sculptures to be remembered the same way.”
Quotes from others about the person
Robert Grosvenor's works are strange, not only, and perhaps not even primarily, because of the forms and materials that they use. They are strange because of the structure of inversion that informs them. This structure closes the works in upon themselves and bends all references (strange or not) back on the sculpture itself. […] One stands in front of the sculpture […] one walks around it, enters its space, sees everything, recognizes everything, and is still not in a position to make it match up with what these things usually are. […] There is nothing but to accept the sculpture and its individual elements as that what they are under the conditions of this sculpture. It protects the sculpture and its elements against all kinds of consumption.
On January 18, 1966 Robert married Jacqueline Gardner, with whom he has three children: Kali, Marina, and Jeremy.