NEW YORK, NY.- Paula Cooper Gallery announced the death of Robert Grosvenor on September 3, 2025 at age 88.

Grosvenor eluded artistic categorization during his more than sixty-year career, producing diverse, singular works that explore the spatial dynamics between object, architecture, and viewer. Known primarily as a sculptor, his work also includes photography, drawing and collage. Grosvenor was an “artists’ artist” whose work was widely revered by younger artists especially, and consistently provided inspiration to his peers and the generations that followed.

A major exhibition of Grosvenor’s work is currently on view at the Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (August 30, 2025–January 11, 2026).

Grosvenor was educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Dijon (1956); the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (1957-1959); and the Università de Perugia (1958). He considered his career to have actually begun with the exhibition of Transoxiana (1965) in a group show at the New York artist’s cooperative Park Place. Grosvenor was subsequently included in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum (1966), a seminal exhibition that helped define minimalism. Two years later Grosvenor presented another (untitled) cantilevered sculpture on an even larger scale in Minimal Art at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (1968), the exhibition that introduced minimalism to European audiences.

Grosvenor began working with Paula Cooper in 1965 as a member of the Park Place cooperative, where Cooper was the Director until its closure in 1967. The Park Place Gallery was the first large-scale artists’ cooperative active in New York, and during its six years of operation it hosted groundbreaking exhibitions of painting and sculpture. After the cooperative closed, Grosvenor joined the Paula Cooper Gallery when it opened at 96-100 Prince Street in 1968.

Grosvenor’s first exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery took place in 1970, setting the precedent for future presentations to come with a single monumental untitled sculpture in white plywood and steel suspended between ceiling and floor and dramatizing the surrounding space. Another twenty-five one-person exhibitions of Grosvenor’s work at the Paula Cooper Gallery’s various locations followed.

Throughout his career Grosvenor has been honored with one-person exhibitions at prestigious international institutions such as P.S.1, New York (1984); Centre d'Art Contemporain du Domaine de Kerguehennec à Bignan, Locmine, France (1989); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1992); the Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2005); the Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2017); the ICA Miami (2019) and the Fridericianum, Kassel (2025–2026). Important group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial exhibitions of 1973 and 2010, Documenta 6 (1977) and Documenta 8 (1987), and the Venice Biennale (2022).