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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Jacob Kassay, Robert Morris, Virginia Overton at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

Jacob Kassay 
Robert Morris
Virginia Overton

Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

December 17, 2010 - January 29, 2011

“I believe there are ‘forms’ to be found within the activity of making as much as within the end products.” 
--Robert Morris

Mitchell-Innes & Nash will exhibited a three-person show of new work by New York artists Jacob Kassay and Virginia Overton, and felt sculptures from the 1970s by Robert Morris. This exhibition juxtaposes works by each artist that explore the interplay between material, process, and form. Together the works are related in their physicality and empirical nature: the record of the artists’ actions is an intrinsic part of the work itself. The work of Virginia Overton and Jacob Kassay represent a new generation’s engagement with the phenomenological and materially-based practices that Robert Morris pioneered in the late 1960s.

JACOB KASSAY’s electroplated canvases operate as both object and image, as their surfaces reflect the exhibition site and the viewer. In this sense they are both completely literal and endlessly referential. His new works made with burlap and mirrors extend this interest in working with light and a continually changing surface. A new series of white and dark canvases engage the history of the monochrome, and continue his exploration of the specific object.

For VIRGINIA OVERTON, exhibition situations give rise to sculptural and spatial solutions. She explores the generative possibilities of spaces and the visual power of ad hoc solutions. For Virginia Overton, the sculptural possibilities of everyday objects are enormous; she has used extension ladders and planks covered in construction “mud” to activate spaces. For this exhibition, she will utilize the gallery architecture in a new site-specific work.

In ROBERT MORRIS’s felt pieces from the early 1970s, the artist performed basic operations on the fabric – cutting, piling, hanging – and allowed the reactions of the material to determine the form of the work. In his seminal 1968 essay, “Anti-form,” Robert Morris said: “Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things is a positive assertion. It is part of the work's refusal to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.”

JACOB KASSAY was born in Buffalo and lives and works in New York. He has exhibited at galleries and institutions in the U.S. and internationally, including Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, and the Kitchen, New York.

VIRGINIA OVERTON was born in Nashville, Tennessee and lives and works in New York. She has exhibited at SculptureCenter, New York, the Greater New York exhibition at PS1, and Le Magasin in Grenoble, France, among other museums and galleries in the U.S. and Europe. She will be included in the White Columns Annual in New York this month.

ROBERT MORRIS is an influential American artist who has made important contributions in sculpture, installation, process and performance art. His work has moved frequently among genres, defying categorization. He has shown a consistent interest in the dematerialization of the art object and site specificity, while using a variety of ephemeral materials including textile, dirt, and mirrors. Also known for his criticism, Morris is considered one of the crucial theorists of Minimalism. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Tate Modern in London, among many other institutions.

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH

534 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.miandn.com 

Previous exhibition: Anthony Caro: Upright Sculptures, November 4 - December 11, 2010

Upcoming exhibitions at Mitchell-Innes & Nash:

Martin Kersels, February - March, 2011
Kenneth Noland, March - April, 2011
Leon Kossof, May - June, 2011

Robert Morris, Deflationary Objects, 1962-1976 at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

Robert Morris 

Deflationary Objects, 1962-1976

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York 

November 4 - December 20, 2008

Leo Castelli Gallery presents “Robert Morris, Deflationary Objects, 1962-1976”, an exhibition of small-scale sculptures by the well-known American artist. First exhibited at the Green Gallery in New York in 1963, these sculptures have over the years become one of Robert Morris’ most unique and iconic bodies of work. This is the first time the public have the chance to see several of these works together since Robert Morris’ retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1994.

Art critics have often described these sculptures as Neo-Dada because of the close relation they have with Duchamp’s work. Pharmacy, 1962, for example, consists of a pseudo-scientific structure where facing mirrors reflect a central glass slide on which one side there is a painted green form; the other the same form painted in red. This work directly relates to the 1914 sculpture by Duchamp entitled Pharmacie.

In other sculptures, however, the relationship to Duchamp is not as explicit and more often relates to Duchamp’s general interest in investigations of perception and measurement. Recurrent in several works are rulers, like Ruler and Shadow, 1962, where a measuring ruler sticks out of a wood panel, creating a shadow on it that is then raised in relief; or in Untitled (Cock/Cunt), 1963 consisting of two artist made rulers hinged together and mounted on a painted wood base. When the rulers are closed on to one another the words “cunt” and “cock” can be read on the wood. These rulers also are illustrative of another of Robert Morris’ interests: memory. His rulers are not exact in their measurement, not because they are not intended to be, but rather because he made them by memory, according to what his idea or recollection of one “inch”.

The artist’s perception of himself can be seen in several sculptures that are quite unconventional and revolutionary self-portraits for their time. I-box, 1962, is comprised of a wooden box covered in sculpmetal with a pink door in the shape of the letter I. When the door is opened it reveals a photograph of the artist naked. Self-Portrait (EEG), 1963, is based on the artist’s electroencephalogram, the measurement of electrical activity produced by the brain as recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp. The artist concentrated on himself for the length of time it took the electroencephalograph to inscribe lines equal to his height. He then used a lead label to distinguish each line and its corresponding region of the brain.

The works are constructed of wood, plaster or lead. These sculptures are often painted in a light gray color that gives them their characteristic appearance.

LEO CASTELLI GALLERY

18 East 77th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.castelligallery.com