Robert Morris
dal 8/2/2012 al 16/3/2012
Segnalato da
8/2/2012
Robert Morris
Spruth Magers, Berlin
In his second solo exhibition in Berlin Morris combines various spatial conceptions which emphasize the experience of art as a process and employ sculptural works to create situations of change, displacement, and disorientation so as to initiate for the viewer constantly unexpected and evolving possibilities of perception.
Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Robert Morris in Berlin. The American artist is displaying a selection of space-related works which offer a historical overview of his involvement with sculpture.
The interdisciplinary work of Robert Morris, which extends from objects, sculptures and drawings through performances all the way to films and texts, has exercised a strong influence on developments in art ever since the 1960s. As an important thinker at the end of the avant-gardes of modernism, proceeding from Minimal Art, he detached himself early on from a rigid concept of the work of art and from the autonomous aura of the object, addressing above all the process of artistic production, which he displayed as an essential component of his works. During the 1960s, he was involved with the Judson Dance Theater in New York, where he participated in performances by Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti and conceived his own choreographies. The engagement with postmodern dance gave rise to a significant constant within his sculptural works : The investigation of an inclusion of the viewer which focuses on the temporal perception of sculpture by means of bodily movement through space, and which furthermore directs the view from the institutional space out onto social aspects in the real world. Thus in the current exhibition as well, Robert Morris activates, through a specific spatial arrangement of his works, performative and self-reflective modes of perception in the viewers.
The exhibition will feature two installations which use sound to create an altered spatial situation. Both works take up the aspect of an assembly or an inner dialogue whose speakers, however, remain absent. Chairs (2001), one of Morris' more recent works, consists of a circle of small-sized chairs which are covered by lead elements that are shaped by hand into the form of textile sheets. In contrast to the older works, there ensues here a narrative scene which indicates a possible meeting of children who, accompanied by a sonnet, exchange their thoughts. The 8-track sound installation Voices from 1974, which can be heard for the first time as a digitally synchronized version, consists of a complex choreography of several voices and soundtracks emanating into the empty space from eight loudspeakers. The abstract audio-play lasts three and a half hours and brings together spoken texts, some of which were written by Robert Morris while others compris e excerpts from Emil Kraepelin's Dementia Praecox (1919) and Manic Depressive Insanity and Paranoia (1921) which he edited. Voices consists of four sequences, whereby each differs from the next with respect to the subject matter and the editing technique. The mental, introspective narrative space built up by the speakers is connected with a discontinuous experience of the real space, inasmuch as the voices from the various sources of sound can only be followed through a physical movement.
Image: Robert Morris, Lead and Felt, 1969, Copyright the artist / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2012, Courtesy Castelli Gallery and Sprüth Magers Berlin London
Opening: FEB 9, 2012, 6–9 PM
Spruth Magers
Oranienburger Strasse, 18 - Berlin
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am-6pm
Admission Free