Robert Morris

Monumentum 2015-2018 is the first exhibition to be dedicated to the artist since he passed away in November 2018, and it presents a series of works produced by Morris in the final years of his life, and never shown in Europe before. These are sculptures depicting human figures, belonging to the two series MOLTINGSEXOSKELETONSSHROUDS, made of Belgian linen soaked in resin and placed over models to take on their form, and Boustrophedons, in carbon fibre, exhibited respectively in 2015 and 2017 at the Castelli Gallery in New York. The unprecedented spatial relationship between the two series exhibited at the Galleria Nazionale of Rome is the fruit of a design agreed with Morris himself before his passing. Morris' recent sculptural groups bear witness to the artist's growing interest in the human figure, and in the work of the great masters of the past. This marks a shift in his formal vocabulary, which seems to be definitively released from the sense of order and abstraction typical of much of the American avant-garde, to move towards more emphatically Baroque and allegorical elements.