Robert Grosvenor

Over a fifty-year 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.
In 2017, the Renaissance Society presented an exhibition of the sculptor’s untitled work from 1989 to 1990. Re-contextualized within a spare architectural installation, this assemblage of materials and found objects eludes interpretation at the same time as it asserts its form and construction. Such nuances, combined with its ambiguous scale, evoke what critic John Yau has suggested is the labor of an “anonymous worker.” Grosvenor has made significant contributions as a sculptor over the past fifty years, but relatively few books have been published about his work. This monograph documents the Renaissance Society show and also features new scholarship considering Grosvenor’s work with a broad scope. The text includes contributions by Yves-Alain Bois, Bruce Hainley, Susan Howe, John Yau, and Renaissance Society executive director and chief curator Solveig Øvstebø.

Solveig Øvstebø is executive director and chief curator of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Robert Grosvenor was born in New York City in 1937 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in France and the Universitá di Perugia in Italy. Important one-person exhibitions of Grosvenor’s work have been presented at the Kunsthalle Bern (1992) and the Fundação de Serralves, Porto (2005), and he participated in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.