Robert Smithson: Primordial Beginnings was presented at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris, between December 1, 2020, and January 9, 2021.
The exhibition investigated Smithson’s exploration of, as he said in 1972, “origins and ‘Primordial Beginnings,’ […] the archetypal nature of things.” This careful selection of works on paper demonstrated how Smithson worked as, to use his words, a “geological agent.” He presciently explored the impact of human beings on the surface of our planet. The earliest works were fantastical science fiction landscape paintings embedded in geological thinking. These rarely seen paintings from 1961 pointed to his later earthworks and proposals for collaborations with industry. Between 1961 and 1963, Smithson developed a series of collages showing evolving amphibians and dinosaurs. Paris in the Spring (1963) depicts a winged youth atop a Triceratops beside the Eiffel Tower, while Algae Algae (ca. 1961–63) combined painted and collaged turtles in a dark green sea of words.
For Smithson, landscape and its inhabitants were always undergoing change. In 1969, he began working with temporal sculptures made from gravitational flows and pours, thinking through these alluvial ideas in drawings. The first realized flow was Asphalt Rundown, in October 1969 in Rome, and the last, Partially Buried Woodshed, took place on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. A selection of drawings related to these important event sculptures were on display in Primordial Beginnings. Smithson was invested in a definition of sculpture that was time-bound and precarious, that would not claim monumental status, and would instead collaborate with entropy.
Primordial Beginnings was accompanied by a simultaneous exhibition, Hypothetical Islands, at Marian Goodman Gallery, London. Both were organized by Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, and Philipp Kaiser, Chief Executive Director of Artists and Programs at Marian Goodman Galleries.
Click here to view an Online Viewing Room presented by Marian Goodman Gallery.
Click here to see the poster for the exhibition.
Image:
Robert Smithson, Algae, algae (ca. 1961-1963)
Paint and photo collage on Masonite
23 3/8 x 27 1/4 x 1/4 in. (59.3 x 69.1 x 0.6 cm)© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
