Robert Morris
Birth Date: February 9, 1931
Death Date: November 28, 2018
Artist Gallery
Robert Morris was born in 1931 in Kansas City, Missouri. During the 1950s, Morris grew interested in dance while living in San Francisco with his wife, the dancer and choreographer Simone Forti. After moving to New York in 1959, they participated in a loose-knit confederation of dancers known as the Judson Dance Theater. During the 1960s and 1970s, Morris played a central role in defining three principal artistic movements of the period: Minimalist sculpture, Process Art, and Earthworks. He created his earliest Minimalist objects as props for his dance performances. In the latter half of the 1960s, Morris explored more elaborate industrial processes for his Minimalist sculpture, using materials such as aluminum and steel mesh. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the rigid plywood and steel of Morris’s Minimalist works gave way to the soft materials of his experiments with Process Art. Primary among these materials was felt and a variety of these felt works were shown in 1968 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Other projects Morris made during the late 1960s and early 1970s include indoor installations of the materials; dirt and thread waste, which resisted deliberate shaping into predetermined forms, and monumental outdoor Earthworks. Since the 1970s, Morris has explored such varied mediums as blindfolded drawings, mirror installations, encaustic paintings, and plaster and fiberglass castings, and themes ranging from nuclear holocaust to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The artist lives in New York City and Gardiner, New York.