Robert Morris

On March 24, 2012 the Sonnabend Gallery will open “Labyrinths,” an exhibition of drawings and a full scale labyrinth installation by Robert Morris.

The drawings on view are selections from various series spanning the 1970s through the 2000s, providing an overview of the recurring theme of the labyrinth throughout Robert Morris’s body of work. A new labyrinth constructed of chain link fencing is installed in the gallery’s courtyard.

Robert Morris has said of his labyrinth works:

“The labyrinth is a form that recedes back beyond memory. And it seems to have been a kind of metaphysical architecture, one that was never actually built in ancient times but rather inscribed in petroglyphs, or stamped in coins, and later manifested in mosaics or depicted in paintings. Beyond its origins being shrouded in the unrecoverable past, its function in ancient times remains a subject of endless speculation. Metaphors rise and fall here; labyrinthine meanings are reflected in the form itself.”

“I think of Wittgenstein’s remark about how language is a labyrinth of paths; approached from one side one loses one’s way. So too forming with the non-linguistic can become labyrinthine, coherent from one side, not from another. Within the ‘labyrinth’ a paradox is allowed: we lose ourselves to find ourselves.”

The exhibition will continue through April 21, 2012.