Robert Morris

Using drawings as studies for paintings and sculpture, diagrams, as well as documents of physical processes, Morris redefines their role by exploring new media and techniques. His monumental drawings which enlarge the image from the page to the mural are a distinctive innovation in contemporary art which refers back to antiquity and the Renaissance. The drawings are enriched by Morris’s references to archaeology and philosophy as well as to old masters like Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci and modern masters like Cézanne and Pollock. Among the works exhibited for the first time are the drawings based on Goya, the artist who is foremost in Morris’s mind as he examines the disasters and follies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing for Morris became the principle means to solve aesthetic problems that have preoccupied him since his decision to stop painting in 1958 – the year ARTnews named him the best young painter in the United States. Morris began drawing as a child and has continued without interruption throughout his life. In drawing, he found the way finally to express his painterly gifts without compromising with either academicism or facile illustration of his continuing political engagement, as exemplified in the final series of Blind Time drawings inspired by Guantanamo Bay torture scenes. In drawing, Morris explores new ground, especially with regard to representational imagery – barred from painting as academic – and an architectural scale heretofore unknown in drawing. The intimate and private nature of drawing also permits him a degree of personal expression absent from his three-dimensional work.