Currently the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany presents Robert Smithson in Europe through to April 19, 2026. The exhibition brings together Robert Smithson’s artistic production in the Netherlands, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany, with a special focus on North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) - the region local to the city of Bottrop.
Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles
In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” This exhibition takes him at his word. Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson invites eighteen artists to join him on the floor as partners who resist, improvise, and extend the rhythm of his thinking.
Joan Jonas: An Island Departure, with Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson is currently on show at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine through to March 1, 2026. This special collaboration with the Farnsworth presents a newly commissioned body of work by artist Joan Jonas (b. 1936) that has stemmed from our artist commission The Island Project: Point of Departure.
Robert Smithson's Overgrown Structure (1971) is currently on view in the exhibition Mutual Aid. Art in collaboration with nature at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino.
This July, SITE SANTA FE, in collaboration with artist Teresita Fernández and Holt/Smithson Foundation, presents the exhibition Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson. Artist-led and conceptually driven, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is a subjective, intergenerational conversation between two practices, pulling the past into the present. The exhibition critically considers entanglements between place, site, seeing, and deep time through the artists’ mutual engagement with material intelligence, geological agency, and cartographic fictions.
Robert Smithson: Mundus Subterraneus was presented at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris from January 13 through February 24, 2024. Developed with Professor Adrian Rifkin, this exhibition focuses on Smithson’s works on paper made in the early 1960s, presenting drawings and collages that set the ground for his studies of entropy and the fall of modernism. Many of these drawings have never previously been seen. Leather-clad bikers, crumbling cities, movie stills, occult books, and erotic entanglements buzz against references to the dogmas of art history, religion, and totalitarianism.
In 1961, at twenty-three, Robert Smithson (1938-1973) travelled to Rome for his solo show of religious-themed paintings at George Lester Gallery. During his stay in Rome, Smithson was able to further explore his interest in Western history—in what he described as byzantine art, ideas of archetype, myth, and anthropomorphism, and what he named the “façade of catholicism”. This period is also marked by what Smithson described as an artistic and spiritual “inner crisis”.
On October 19, 2022 the Palais de Tokyo and Lafayette Anticipations present the two-part exhibition Humpty \ Dumpty, a project by artist Cyprien Gaillard.
Works by Robert Smithson will be included in the group exhibition The Power of Wonder: New Materialisms in Contemporary Art at Museum unter Tage, in Bochum, Germany.
Robert Smithson: Abstract Cartography was presented at Marian Goodman Gallery New York between June 24 and August 20, 2021 in teh Midtown gallery space. The exhibition focused on a crucial five-year period in Robert Smithson’s development: 1966 to 1971, a time when his “inklings of earthworks” began.
Marian Goodman Gallery London and Holt/Smithson Foundation are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Robert Smithson in the U.K. Hypothetical Islands will be on view from December 2, 2020 to January 9, 2021.
Primordial Beginnings 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 demonstrates how Smithson worked as, to use his words, a geological agent. He presciently explored the impact of human beings of the surface of our planet. The earliest works are fantastical science fiction landscape paintings embedded in geological thinking. These rarely seen paintings from 1961 point to his later earthworks and proposals for collaborations with industry.
Robert Smithson’s Mono Lake Nonsite (Cinders Near Black Point) (1968) is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego from November 21, 2019 to March 19 2020 in the exhibition Bound to the Earth: Art, Materiality, and the Natural World, drawn from the museum’s collection.