American Masters

Robert Morris

United States of America born 1931

Robert Morris was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on 9 February 1931. He studied at the University of Kansas and Kansas City Art Institute from 1948 to 1950, at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, in 1951, at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, from 1953 to 1955, and at Hunter College, New York, in 1961–62. He held his first solo exhibition of paintings at Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, in 1957. His solo exhibition at the Green Gallery, New York, in 1963, consisting of simple, grey-painted plywood polyhedrons, was a landmark in the emergence of Minimal sculpture, and Morris became a key participant in the group exhibitions that defined the movement, notably Shape and Structure at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, in 1965, and Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, New York, the following year. In the late 1960s he contributed a number of polemical articles on Minimal sculpture to the magazine Artforum. From the late 1950s Morris also worked in choreography and then performance art, using a combination of dance, theatre and the plastic arts to explore relationships between objects and audience.

Morris was given his first museum exhibition at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1968, and museum shows have occurred regularly in Europe and the United States since that time, notably at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1971, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1977, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, in 1981, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1986, and a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museums, New York, in 1994, which was shown at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, in 1995. During the 1980s and 1990s Morris also produced large-scale apocalyptic drawings and paintings mounted in elaborate relief frames. He lives and works in New York.

See more works by this artist in the NGA collection

Robert Morris In the realm of the carceral. Inmate work project: perpetual construction and dismantling of the labyrinth 1978 Purchased 1980 Learn more

Robert Morris In the realm of the carceral. Stockade 1978 Purchased 1980 Learn more