Robert Grosvenor, whose enticing, enigmatic art tested gravity in monumental sculptures, turned familiar objects, like boats and vintage cars, into mysterious contraptions, and pictured oddball items, like green frosted doughnuts floating in the sea, in photographs, died on Sept. 3 at his home in East Patchogue, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 88.
The cause was kidney cancer, said his son, Jeremy Grosvenor.
In the early 1960s, Mr. Grosvenor was part of a group of maverick artists working and showing in a Manhattan gallery co-op they had created. Park Place, as they called it, named for its address, 79 Park Place, was housed in a derelict building in the financial district, then a ghost town — and prime real estate for artists to colonize. The gallery’s members, including Mark di Suvero, Dean Fleming, Tamara Melcher, Forrest Myers and David Novros, were making work well outside the mainstream — and far from the power brokers on the Upper East Side.
The gallery’s director was Paula Cooper, who would one day be an art world power broker in her own right but who at the time was, like the artists, still in her 20s and not calling the shots. “I worked for them,” she said in an interview.
Mr. Grosvenor’s first major piece, which he showed at Park Place in 1965, was a giant structure of plywood and Masonite, painted silver and bright yellow. It was shaped like the first two strokes of the letter N, with the upstroke planted on the floor and the down stroke’s point hovering, ever so slightly, above the floor. It was inspired, Mr. Grosvenor said, by a 30-foot-high solar telescope in Arizona that he’d seen in a photograph.
He named the piece “Topanga,” because he liked the way it sounded. Like much of his work, it was a feat of engineering; the curator Alanna Heiss said in an interview that you could never think of space in the same way after seeing a Grosvenor sculpture.
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