Robert Grosvenor’s formative years coincided with those of the leading Minimalist sculptors Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris. In the 1960s, Grosvenor, with fellow sculptors Ronald Bladen and Mark di Suvero, founded the artist-run Park Place Gallery in Soho, and his work was included in Primary Structures, the 1966 landmark exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York that became a showcase for American minimalist sculpture. Unlike mainstream Minimalism, Grosvenor’s sculptures dispense with the reductivism and intellectual gravity of that period. Grosvenor’s objects are playful, capricious, or mischievously thoughtful. They are dynamic rather than inert.

But it is the sparse works created since the 1990s that have proven him to be one of the most intriguing and most American of artists working today. Grosvenor’s early sculptures dealt primarily with gravity and tension within given architectural structures. However, the artist’s newer installations, assimilating influences from art history, everyday life, and commercial design, bring his work closer to the Las Vegas-influenced Postmodernism of Robert Venturi and may be understood, in their own idiosyncratic place, as abstracted archetypes of the American vernacular subconsciousness.