Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to continue our artist-centric newsletter
IN FOCUS, where we delve deeply into one artist on the MGG roster at a time. Aiming to show a fuller picture of the breadth of our artists' careers, we will feature our favorite stories, podcasts, interviews, artists’ writings and videos from the archive, as well as new and upcoming projects.
Robert Smithson (1938–1973, b. Passaic, New Jersey), was an artist who expanded what art could be and where it could be found. For over fifty years his work and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers alike, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown. Smithson was an autodidact whose interests in travel, cartography, geology, architectural ruins, prehistory, philosophy, science-fiction, popular culture, and language spiral through his work. He was fascinated by concepts of duality, entropy, and questions of how we might find our place in the world. In his short and prolific life, Smithson produced paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural schemes, films, photographs, writings, earthworks, and all the stops in between. From his landmark earthworks,
Spiral Jetty (1970) and
Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), which celebrate their fiftieth anniversary this year, to his 'quasi-minimalist' sculptures, Nonsites, writings, projects and proposals, collages, detailed drawings, and radical rethinking of landscape, Smithson's ideas remain profoundly urgent for our times.
Today, follow along as we explore the reflective practice of Robert Smithson, particularly surrounding his concurrent exhibitions at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris and London (
Primordial Beginnings and
Hypothetical Islands, respectively, both running through 9 January 2021). ↓
