Robert Morris: Recent Paintings

About the exhibition
This solo exhibition presented a recent body of work by Robert Morris, one of the most influential figures in postwar American art. First shown earlier the same year at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, the works offered a powerful collage of death, disaster, disintegration, memory and human history.

Morris played a defining role in the development of three key movements of the 1960s and ’70s: Minimalist sculpture, Process art and Earthworks. However, by the 1980s, his practice concentrated on the events of World War II: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the firestorms that followed the saturation bombing of Dresden and, in these works, the victims of Nazi concentration camps.

The central image of each work in the exhibition was borrowed from one of the photographs in the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial archive in Jerusalem. Morris silk-screened these archival images onto aluminium and overpainted them with encaustic. The works were encased in sculptural  fibreglass ‘frames’ made from an assemblage of cast branches, toy weapons, and machine and anatomical parts—including those of the artist’s own body.

Acknowledgements
These works were brought to Australia for the Adelaide Festival of Arts with assistance from the Visual Arts/Crafts Board of the Australia Council.

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^{Image: Robert Morris, Untitled 1983–84, watercolour and pastel on paper laid down on canvas, in Hydrocal plaster artist’s frame, 177.8 x 221 cm (overall). Image courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York, United States}