Robert Grosvenor is one of the artists who were chosen for the 2022 Art Biennale in Venice, Italy. One of the works he presented there was an orange scooter inside an industrial shipping container with a gold interior. Robert Grosvenor’s installation at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York engages similar forms, materials, and ideas on an increased scale: an orange vehicle without wheels that sits directly on the floor, with ten bowling pins next to the vehicle. The installation has been on show from January 7-28, 2023.
Robert Grosvenor at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. New York, January 14, 2023.
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Press text: A prolonged fascination with the aerodynamics of machinery and vehicular shapes informs the refined form and vibrant color of Grosvenor’s recent sculpture. This exhibition follows Grosvenor’s participation in the 2022 Venice Biennale, where the artist installed three large-scale sculptures. One of these, an untitled work dated 2018, presented an orange scooter inside an industrial shipping container with a gold interior. This mesmerizing and subtly elusive work informed the artist’s new installation at Paula Cooper Gallery, which engages similar forms, materials, and ideas on an increased scale. A vibrant orange vehicle without wheels sits directly on the floor. Adjacent to the vehicle, ten bowling pins are arranged in the triangular formation typical of the game. Positioned such that half of the triangle is directly in front of the vehicle, the composition is both deliberate and ambiguous, imparting a distinct strangeness. A series of photographs taken between 2000 and 2013 translates Grosvenor’s formal vocabulary into two-dimensional images of everyday life. As with his sculptures, the photographs blur the boundaries between found object and artwork, presenting a breadth of objects in striking, often comical, arrangements. Themes of automation, containment and architecture connect the images, which picture vehicles and structures so characteristic of Grosvenor that one wonders if he made them himself. The commanding horizontality, cropped perspectives and silhouetted subjects offer a compelling and uncanny alternate reality.
