Robert Morris

On February 8, 2014 the Sonnabend Gallery will open an exhibition of new works by Robert Morris.

The twelve works in the exhibition, completed between 2011 and the present, are from his new Hardwood series which revisits themes and forms Morris explored in his early plywood work of the 1960s such as arches, steps, tracks, and columns.

If these architectural references recall earlier, “minimal” themes, the precise facture and sensuous surfaces of walnut, maple and cherry of the present works have a completely different sense while continuing to be concerned with the body’s relation to scale and space.

To execute these works in hardwood, Morris worked with fabricator Josh Finn in High Falls, New York.

The exhibition will continue through March 15.

Please contact the gallery for further information.

ALSO ON VIEW:

A full scale labyrinth installation by Robert Morris is on view at Sonnabend Gallery in the courtyard.

Robert Morris has said of his labyrinth works:

“The labyrinth is a form that recedes back beyond memory. And it seems to have been a kind of metaphysical architecture, one that was never actually built in ancient times but rather inscribed in petroglyphs, or stamped in coins, and later manifested in mosaics or depicted in paintings. Beyond its origins being shrouded in the unrecoverable past, its function in ancient times remains a subject of endless speculation. Metaphors rise and fall here; labyrinthine meanings are reflected in the form itself.”

“I think of Wittgenstein’s remark about how language is a labyrinth of paths; approached from one side one loses one’s way. So too forming with the non-linguistic can become labyrinthine, coherent from one side, not from another. Within the ‘labyrinth’ a paradox is allowed: we lose ourselves to find ourselves.”