Robert Grosvenor, known for his Minimalist sculptures and room-sized installations, died on September 3rd at age 88. Grosvenor’s death was announced by Paula Cooper Gallery, which had represented the artist from 1968 to 2023. He was also represented by Karma and Galerie Max Hetzler.
Grosvenor’s practice centered on the interaction between objects and the spaces they occupied. His sculptures frequently involved suspended or cantilevered forms that called attention to the space around them as much as the structures themselves. While linked to Minimalism at the start of his career, he later diverged from its sleek abstract aesthetics.
Born in New York in 1937, Grosvenor was raised in Arizona and Newport, Rhode Island. During the 1950s, he traveled to Europe to study art at the École des Beaux Arts in Dijon, France, in 1956; the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris from 1957 to 1959; and the Università di Perugia in Italy in 1958. He returned to the U.S. in 1959 after being conscripted for military service, though he was never called into active combat.
Grosvenor started his art career with paintings, but he began to establish himself as a sculptor with the presentation of Topanga (1965) at Park Place, a New York artists’ cooperative where Paula Cooper served as director. In 1966, he presented a similar V-shaped wood-and-steel sculpture, Transoxiana (1965), in the exhibition “Primary Structures” at New York’s Jewish Museum, an exhibition that helped define Minimalism. His cantilevered sculptures were later included in “Minimal Art” at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands in 1968, which introduced the movement to European audiences.
By the 1970s, Grosvenor’s practice began integrating found materials, such as discarded wooden telephone poles that he would color with the fragrant chemical creosote. His works throughout the ’80s and ’90s were defined by large-scale geometric and architectural sculptures. After the 2000s, the artist began to sculpt boats and cars, inspired by his time in the Florida Keys, where he once lived.
Grosvenor exhibited widely throughout his life. Paula Cooper staged 20 solo exhibitions for the artist from 1970 onward. His institutional solo shows included presentations at New York’s MoMA PS1 in 1984, Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland in 1992, the Fundação de Serralves in Porto, Portugal, in 2005, and the ICA Miami in 2019.
He also appeared in major group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial in 1973 and 2010, Documenta 6 in 1977, Documenta 8 in 1987, and the Venice Biennale in 2022. A retrospective is currently on view at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, through January 2026.
