Robert Grosvenor
NEW YORK—Robert Grosvenor and David Novros will show work in various media in intertwining exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery, opening on February 27th. The exhibition will continue through April 3rd.
Grosvenor, a sculptor, and Novros, a painter, met as members of the artists’ cooperative and gallery Park Place, a hotbed of avant-garde art in the 1960s. Contemporaries, friends and mutual admirers of each other’s work, they both possess a keen sensitivity to architectural space, and often create art with particular viewing conditions in mind. This shared sense of art’s interaction with physical space especially informs Novros’s fresco work and Grosvenor’s multi-part sculptures made of elements placed in relationship to each other.
In this exhibition, Grosvenor will show four recent works that reveal a renewed interest in bold color, texture and the intimation of movement. Three floor-bound works allude to vehicular shapes and aerodynamism while also disallowing any simple figurative reading. They are accompanied by a wall sculpture that uses language as material, forming visual poetry from two rows of hand-painted letters. A suite of collages serve as studies for Grosvenor’s sculpture by resituating similar forms in everyday surroundings.
Novros will show watercolors from the 1970s to 2020 alongside intimate works and sketches contained in notebooks, as well as a large, multipaneled painting from 1971, originally one half of a pair. The companion piece, no longer extant, is represented by preparatory and commemorative drawings. Accompanying these works are designs for frescos, murals, stained-glass windows, and other site-specific works. Together, these materials begin to communicate Novros’s dedication to creating a permanent relationship between an artwork and a space by painting in place.
Robert Grosvenor was born in 1937 in New York City, and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in France, and the Universitá di Perugia in Italy. His work was included in the seminally important group exhibitions Primary Structures (Jewish Museum, 1966) and Minimal Art (Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, 1968). One-person exhibitions of Grosvenor’s work have been presented at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1992), the Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2005), the Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2017), and the ICA Miami (2019).
David Novros was born in 1941 in Los Angeles, CA, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California in 1963. His work was first exhibited in a two-person show with Mark di Suvero in 1965 at the Park Place Gallery, and was included in the hugely influential Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim in 1966. Novros’s works are owned by prominent international institutions, with significant collections held at the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany, and the Menil Collection, Houston, TX. From February 23 – May 21, 2021, Novros’s immersive installation of painted rooms created for the 1975 exhibition Marden, Novros, Rothko: Painting in the Age of Actuality will be reinstalled for the first time at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX.
For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105
or info@paulacoopergallery.com