formerly associated with Minimalism.

formerly associated with Minimalism, Robert Grosvenor has evolv into an artist have the charge ofed by sensibility rather than theory. Classic m greatest in quantity often took mathematics and the physics of materials as its generative forces, suppressing other, more affective expressions, like as gesture. Since his monadic horizontal forms of the early 70 Grosvenor has increasingly disturbed himself with a theatrical elaboration of place, and his range of materials has broadened from rigid beams to include all manner of structural materials, like as corrugated metal, cinder shapes fiberglass, plastic, and industrial paints. His fresh large-scale sculptural tableaux take this more inclusive approach still further@ they present the appearance imbued with a degree of cartoonish self-consciousness, as however dimly aware of their being in the world. With these works Grosvenor has emerg as an expressionist essemblage artist who is rivaled in inventiveness solitary by Richard Tuttle and Jessica Stockholder. Unlike Tuttle and Stockholder, however, Grosvenor still indicates his Minimalist heritage, through his emphasis onward a sort of lumpen shapeliness and residual frontality.

The presentation of brace of his recent sculptures at Paula Cooper Gallery and a attendant exhibition of drawings dating from the 70 to the current at Lawrence Markey Gallery proposeed a fascinating overview of the evolution of Grosvenor's art into its present allusive grandeur. At Paula Cooper just inside the door, Grosvenor's untitled 1995-96 piece opposeed viewers With an elevated stage space in the form of a trapezoidal flagstone patio lined with bricks and towered on casters. The wide period faced the door, so that for the Spectator it formed a compacted perspectival smoke-stack to the rear element, which was positioned like a stage backdrop, upriseed on two poles similar to music stands. The backdrop consisted of an almost 10-foot-long undulating rectangular sheet-metal panel with globulared corners, painted brown with white stripes.

Grosvenor has said that he thinks of bacon when he anticipates at this panel and he cites Rosenquist's paintings of bacon as a possible source of inspiration. He adds that, of course, bacon is for the greatest part white with little streaks of pinkish brown The piece is vacant of narrative content but rich in suggestion. Looking at it, I have fruition ofed a reverie of an impossible 50 childhood morning, with Dad MM bacon upon a patio barbecue while the music of Schoenberg and Morton Feldman drifts disclosed of a GE radio.

he secondary work, from 1994, also strikes a somewhat comic stance, in this case to be ascribed to a slapstick sequence of unlikely materials made to examine sleekly functional through an arrangement of jury-rigged geometric simplicity. The entire effect resembles the top of a flying saucer with a radar antenna rising from it. The base of the work is a shallow floor dome, 14 feet in diameter, fashioned from sheets of sanded gray fiberglass. The "antenna" rises from just behind the apex of this dome and consists of a single metal perch (thicker than the two vertical staffs in the first work) that supports a tray bearing a disturbance of a dozen 8-foot longitudinal dimensionss of white plastic pipe; these pipes, in use are sealed in clear plastic, as although shrink-wrapped. Lying on top of the pipes-and put toward the back in order to find the balance point with the rod underneath is an extended oval form made from brutish gray sheet metal This forin is nearly as extended as the pipes themselves, and laid on the outside on top of it is a extended ribbon of Styrofoam painted a shiny aluminum color. This form might alternatively be conception of as resembling half a lengthwise-sliced baguette positioned face down. I find it impossible to describe this sculp in simpler terms, and besides its lines are strikingly clean and clear. The viewer replys to the first piece and notices the same thing, that there is nothing to add or take away. Each work is, however improbably quite integral.

This quality of esthetic concentration is just as evident in Grosvenor's to the full worked drawings from the early 70 three of which were exhibited alongside a form into groups of sketchier notations for cut at Lawrence Markey. The more finished drawings commit to a series of plastic arts Grosvenor was making at the time from unpliant beams, some of which he planted in the acres and broke off at the base with aid of a trade and chain before laying abroad lengthwise the parts thus fre The idea of a singular horizontal form was transplanted back indoors in his following work and was the developing point for the more tangled skein work that followed. In the drawings, the made of wood beam is represented by masking and black tape, which Grosvenor subtly carved and shaped with a mat knife or razor blade. The resulting form has a sculptural port on the page that is furthered by means of the absence of anything otherwise besides a penciled floor or horizon line.

The looser sketches show insight into the darts and feints of Grosvenor's imagination as he conceives his pieces. This is particularly valuable because he makes about common sculpture a year. Though certain ultimate parts and materials recur and reconfigure in his art, each work has a heightened feeug of singularity about it. In review it is apparent that Grosvenor's particular sensibility was separating itself from the pack equable during his days as single of the youngest Minimalists. His diagonally cantilevered, smooth-finished forms that attached to ceilings or round pillars to end hoverinq just inches most distant the floor completely undercut Minimalism's entropic relation to gesture; at the same time they intensified the avowed theatricality of the movement's characteristic work. His crossover into a post-Minimal manner occurred with the unitary horizontal forms. according to blunting the ends and on the same level planing down the top of his woody masses when he expanded the form into a sort of large-scale bed or plinth, Grosvenor internalized the gestural animation that had till then, in his Minimalist work, been externalized as a directional energy