Beschreibung:

Robert Morris Untitled (Brown Felt) 1978 felt, copper grommets 209 x 368 x 38 cm (82 1/4 x 144 7/8 x 14 7/8 in.)
Provenance Jean-Gabriel-Mitterrand Galerie, Paris Francis Briest, Paris, Tableaux Abstraits et Contemporains/Sculptures, 29 November 1996, lot 185 Acquired from the above the sale by the present owner Catalogue Essay This piece is characteristic of Morris’ exploration of soft sculpture in the late 1960s and 1970s, bringing together his earlier immersion in geometric forms of Minimalism and his burgeoning interests in the Abstract Expressionist’s experiments with chance. Morris here plays with the relationship between structure and formlessness, allowing the simple material of felt to create its own form. Morris’ long career defies conventional artistic labels – he worked across media, in performance, dance, film and painting as well as sculpture, and his oeuvre has been associated with a range of movements including Conceptual, Minimalist and Abstract art. However, the breadth of his interests and output has resulted in his work fitting uneasily with any singly term of classification. Having studied engineering at the University of Kansas City, he turned to art, studying at Kansas City Art Institute, the California School of Fine Arts and Reed College, Oregon. In his early career he worked in improvisatory theatre, film and painting, only turning to sculpture in 1961 when he moved to New York, where he still lives and works. His early sculptures were abstract, geometric forms. Like his contemporary, Donald Judd he created Minimalist ‘objects’: cubes, cylinders and other simple volumes in series, in neutral colour and industrial materials, most commonly plywood and fibreglass. The influence of Minimalist principles is still evident in this work: its form is essentially a rectangle, and Morris has again used neutral colour and a single industrial material. However, the hanging form of the soft material lacks the seeming total neutrality and geometric rigour of Minimalism, with emphasis rather on organic movement of the felt material. The shift in Morris' sculpture from the strict forms of his Minimalist work to the loose forms exemplified by this piece can be dated to 1968, when he wrote the seminal essay ‘Anti-Form’. This essay expressed his distaste for the ‘well-built’ aesthetic of Minimalism and his admiration for the centrality of process in the work of Jackson Pollock and Claes Oldenburg Morris here indicated a significant change in attitude toward form and sculpture: “focus on matter and gravity as a means results in forms which were not projected in advance… Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material” (Robert Morris Anti Form, Artforum, April 1968, www.msu.edu). According to Morris, sculpture required a “recovery of process” and “rethinking of the role of both material and tools in making”, rather than rigid, a priori valuation. Turning to Pollock’s dripping and Morris Louis’s pouring as inspiration, Morris relinquishes control over the form of his sculpture, rather embracing the formlessness of unpredictable materials. The philosophy outlined in ‘Anti-Form’ is clearly apparent in his work from this period. He produced sculptural pieces created through lateral spreading, scattering and stacking of materials, thereby liberating sculpture from the convention of a single, fixed entity. These works are open-ended and non-aesthetic, due to the artist’s removal from the artwork, breaking the traditionally direct relationship between artist and finished artwork. The overall configuration of the work is left to the medium itself, with gravity and chance, rather than the artist’s hands, playing a central role. Felt became Morris’ material of choice for over a decade as it met both his practical and aesthetic need being highly pliant and absorbent, but also cheap and widely available. This choice of material has resulted in associations being drawn between his work and the Arte Povera of Joseph Beuys further evidencing his status as in-between conventional classifications. As a result of allowing