CHICAGO, IL.- The Renaissance Society presents an exhibition of work by Robert Grosvenor. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an untitled sculpture from 1989-90, re-contextualized within a spare architectural installation.

Over his 50-year career, Robert Grosvenor has produced a body of work that is at once solidly physical and conceptual, muscular and fluid. Grosvenor frequently melds industrial materials and found objects as he experiments with texture and scale, resulting in formal sculptures that reveal a handmade quality and subtle vein of humor. The works resist association, instead quietly and strangely asserting themselves both as assemblages of relationships and as discrete, holistic entities.

For this sculpture, at once monumental and human-scale, Grosvenor adapts the materials of infrastructure—concrete blocks, steel, Plexiglas and paint—evoking what critic John Yau has suggested is the labor of an “anonymous worker.” Twenty-seven years after its initial realization, how has our sense of this sculpture, from its formal language to its frank materiality, evolved or expanded?

This exhibition also 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. Following the exhibition, the Ren will publish a new monograph featuring contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Bruce Hainley, Susan Howe, John Yau, and others.

Curated by Solveig Øvstebø.

Robert Grosvenor (born 1937, New York City) studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in France and the Universitá di Perugia in Italy. He began exhibiting in the 1960s and was a member of the artist collective Park Place. His work has been prominently included in important exhibitions such as “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. 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. 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, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Serralves Museum, Porto.