This absorbing exhibition by Robert Grosvenor featured a selection of untitled works made between 1990 and 2023: a speedboat, three automobiles, two scooters—all of which were modified by the artist—a uniquely constructed car piece, and eighteen small-scale photographs.
Minimalism glorified seriality. As such, its practitioners often relied on fabricators to make their art. However, post-Minimalists such as Grosvenor favored the personal, embracing filching, trespassing, and other asocial tactics, sourcing everyday things that tended toward the three-dimensional (they also indulged in various narrative devices, such as nostalgia, to give their art a deeper emotional resonance). Indeed, Grosvenor’s sculptures here were all objets trouvés—loaded signifiers chosen with a certain level of affection. He also painted them himself, with no regard for historical precedent in whatever colors he fancied.
Grosvenor’s speedboat represents an ordinary middle-class leisure pursuit and, as a post-Minimal object, accommodates audience identification. The artist stripped his boat of distracting attachments and adjusted the curvature of the hull by making the bow end a lyrical double bend, while adding vintage Cadillac-type fins to the stern. All of these aspects, including openness to narrative, are post-Minimal features. This type of customization, which Grosvenor also performs on his appropriated cars, was especially popular in America in the 1950s and remains so to this day, with those practiced in it turning standard sedans into sleek, souped-up street machines.
However, the artist’s radically reconfigured 1930 Chevrolet, from 2022, is no such thing. It is a rusted-out husk of a severely “chopped” (or “reduced,” à la Minimalism) old-school hot rod. I imagine the Le Corbusier of Toward a New Architecture (1923) would have appreciated the sheer mechanical starkness of its sleek, unbelievably low-slung profile, with its rectilinear tubes and neat quarter-turn corners. Presiding up front in the show was a splendid 1938 Willys, from 2023, that was new when the artist was just a year old. Formally, this automobile calls to mind the classic English Morris Minor. Grosvenor obviously identifies with this shiny purple beaut, having attached goggles to the steering wheel and a rabbit’s-foot key chain to the central control panel.
Grosvenor’s 1950 Ford, from 2022, painted a matte moss green, is extremely low slung and frenched (the term is used to describe the process of smoothing out a car’s external features, or the adjustment of suspension heights between an automobile’s front and rear ends). Such subjective modifications, now popular among gearheads worldwide, are a way of showing off one’s style, mechanical acumen, and social distinction.
The show’s most abstract object, from 2019—beautifully constructed and painted chartreuse—consisted of two windshield frames put together like clamshells with auto-body filler. Its sensuous and symmetrically curvaceous form resembles the shape of a vintage television set’s cathode-ray tube.
The artist’s new sculptures have a way of insinuating themselves into the viewer’s imagination. As his contemporary, I find it historically significant that during our youth, popular American advertisements for how to become a “futuristic” car designer may have inspired a whole generation of budding sculptors (in the same way the Art Instruction Schools’ “Draw Me!” ads, frequently printed on matchbooks, might have spurred many a youth to take up painting). It’s curious to see how a practical thing can retain its identity while also becoming a full-fledged work of art. Grosvenor’s acts of aesthetic consubstantiation elicit a hankering for the past but are wrapped in an unmistakably vanguard sensibility.
