Robert Morris @ Castelli Gallery, NYC - 'Robert Morris: Seeing and Space' Exhibition

Robert Morris: Seeing and Space

Castelli Gallery, New York

April 3 – June 27, 2025

Castelli Gallery presents Robert Morris: Seeing and Space. The exhibition juxtaposes two forms of work dating from the 1970s: Untitled (Walk Around), 1975, a mirror installation; and a group of eight Blind Time drawings dating from 1973 and 1976.

Robert Morris was a pioneer of Minimal art. His minimalist sculpture of the 1960s consisted of abstract objects in plywood, fiberglass, aluminum, and steel. Sitting directly on the floor, these works are blank in affect and large enough to establish a one-to-one physical encounter with the observer.

During the early 1970s the artist’s practice changed direction. One new tendency was the production of objects and installations that can be occupied and walked through. New work took various forms, including installations with mirrors. Here the virtual space of mirror reflection appears to alter or complicate the actual space of the room. Untitled (Walk Around) was the first installation of this kind. It consists of mirrors and flat, empty steel frames arranged to create a sequence of vantages, including positions from which the frames appear—through reflection—to multiply endlessly, a virtual impression of infinite regress.

Beginning in 1973 Robet Morris also embarked on a long series of drawings titled Blind Time. The drawings were produced by the artist with his eyes shut, a bare-handed application of powdered graphite and other mediums directly onto sheets of paper large enough to contain the breadth of his reach. Each drawing follows a set of instructions, or “protocols,” executed according to an estimated length of time.

Together the mirror installations and the Blind Time drawings represent opposing extremes of embodied vision: seeing multiplied and seeing obscured.

Robert Morris: Seeing and Space, is organized by curator and critic Jeffrey Weiss, who has worked extensively on the artist. His past projects include (with Clare Davies) the book Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960-1965, published by Castelli Gallery in partnership with Yale University Press, and Robert Morris: The Perceiving Body, an exhibition that appeared at the Museum of Modern Art (MUDAM), Luxembourg.

CASTELLI GALLERY

24 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018

www.castelligallery.com

Far Away and Close @ Castelli Gallery, NYC with John Chamberlain, Hanne Darboven, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Mike and Doug Starn, Lawrence Weiner

FAR AWAY and CLOSE

John Chamberlain, Hanne Darboven, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Mike and Doug Starn, Lawrence Weiner

Castelli Gallery, New York

September 29 – November 23, 2022

Castelli Gallery presents FAR AWAY and CLOSE, a group exhibition with works by John Chamberlain, Hanne Darboven, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Mike and Doug Starn, and Lawrence Weiner.

The works in the exhibition are realized in a variety of sizes and mediums. Yet, a shared interest in the concept of location, intended both as physical space and a space of mind is what brings them together.

Lawrence Weiner’s Untitled, 1999, a set of six works on paper, showcase the use of tangible space and direction; while the reoccurring phrase, “Caught by ships passing in the night” resonates a feeling of being lost in the metaphorical space. If the work reminds us of movement in space, Hanne Darboven 12 months with Postcards from Today of Horses, 1982, consisting of 12 framed pages of months from the 1982 calendar, remind us of movement in time. Additionally, Hanne Darboven’s collage shows her use of the word heute (“now”) seen across her oeuvre, which she proceeds to cross out, leaving the viewer unsure of the place in time.

A group of John Chamberlain’s collages from View from the Cockpit series show an improbable landscape, at the horizon, as improbable is the landscape in the Mike and Doug Starn photo-collage The No Mind Not Thinks solstil, 2013 and the drawing by Robert Morris 10 Mirrors in a Landscape, 1997. These abstract horizon lines portray an uncertainty in place as it relates to space and time.

Another work by Robert Morris, 1934 Mid-West Dust Storm, 2010, consisting of a drawing made of Epoxy on three aluminum panels, depicts a terrifying sand storm in the Mid-West, something dating from the time he was a child.  This memory of things past reappears in two Untitled drawings by Jasper Johns, in which the artist is including the floorplan of the house where he spent part of his childhood and a reference to the four seasons. In both instances, these recalls in memory showcase the artists’ location at a specific time and place which allows them to return to them through drawing.  

A location can be far away from us, or close. Above all, a location can be a place in the mind, and as such change constantly. Robert Morris Untitled (Location), 1963-1973, contains four mechanisms that requires the installer to manually change the distance depending on where the work is placed on the wall. By creating a work that has the ability to change depending on the space, it evokes a sense of no absolute location.

By bringing together this group of works, the exhibition hopes to bring attention to the similarities between physical space and time when compared to the figurative concept of space of mind.

CASTELLI GALLERY

24 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018

www.castelligallery.com

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Richard Pettibone @ Castelli Gallery, New York - Recent Works

Richard Pettibone: Recent Works 

Castelli Gallery, New York 

September 12 - November 21, 2018 

RICHARD PETTIBONE 

Heart Attack #4, 2018 

Oil on canvas, 11 x 8 ½ inches 

© Richard Pettibone, courtesy Castelli Gallery 

Castelli Gallery presents Richard Pettibone: Recent Works. The exhibition features new paintings by the artist, which revisit subjects that have been pivotal to Richard Pettibone’s work throughout his career. The largest series of paintings on view engage with Marcel Duchamp’s famous cover design for the 1936 issue of the avant-garde art magazine, Cahiers D’Art. The design consists of three concentric hearts in red and blue, which produce an optical illusion of depth and movement. Owing to this illusion, Marcel Duchamp called the image Coeurs Volants, or Fluttering Hearts. Although Duchamp’s work has long been a source of inspiration for Richard Pettibone, this particular image took on an added personal meaning for him after he suffered a heart attack in 2016. In the charming title and image of Duchamp’s Fluttering Hearts, Pettibone found a compelling, if dichotomous, resonance with his own physical experience. The act of reproducing Duchamp’s design by hand not only served as a therapeutic process, but also provided a tangible means of connecting the seemingly contradictory realities of Duchamp’s playful image and the gravity of Richard Pettibone’s own condition.

Other works in the exhibition include paintings of a Shaker chair in the artist’s signature photo realist style. Richard Pettibone first became fascinated by Shaker furniture in the late 1980s when he moved to upstate New York and found himself living near the Shaker Museum in Mount Lebanon. This exposure gained him a deep appreciation for Shaker artisans’ dedication to craftsmanship, a quality that likewise characterizes Richard Pettibone’s own work. The specific inspiration for this series of paintings is a Shaker chair, which the artist bought in 1990. At the time, the chair cost him $2,500. He recently discovered, however, that the same type of chair now sells at auction for only $400. Seen in the light of shifting popular tastes and market values, the chair became a renewed source of interest for Richard Pettibone. Placing the piece of furniture outside on the deck of his house, he painted it as it appeared in the natural sunlight. In these images, the chair is represented independent of such arbitrary signs of worth as price and taste; its significance is seemingly no more nor less than the light it displaces, measurable by the shadow it casts.

A third series of paintings in the exhibition responds to a market trend in the opposite direction. In 1965, Richard Pettibone created his first appropriation of Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, with the financial help of a friend who worked at the local post office. The appropriation was displayed later that year at the prominent Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. As a token of his gratitude, the artist eventually gave the work to his friend as a gift. Over fifty years later, on March 10, 2017, Richard Pettibone’s Bicycle Wheel sold at auction for £62,500. As in the case of the Shaker chair, this fluctuation in the artwork’s worth prompted the artist to revisit his original appropriation by creating a series of paintings honoring this new layer of significance. In reference to the auction that catalyzed this change, Richard Pettibone’s new series of paintings, titled My First Duchamp Bicycle Wheel, 1965, represents not the sculpture itself, but the sculpture’s image published in the auction catalogue.

While the three series of paintings included in the exhibition are in many ways quintessential examples of Richard Pettibone’s work—revisiting some of the artist’s most important inspirations and showcasing his characteristic style—they also present something new in the strong autobiographical through-linethat unites them. In this way, the show as a whole expresses one of the major themes conveyed by each series individually: the idea that although the object itself may remain the same, its value—whether emotional, conceptual, or financial—evolves over time.

CASTELLI GALLERY

18 East 77 Street, New York, NY 10075

www.castelligallery.com