Holt/Smithson Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery are delighted to announce Robert Smithson (1938-1973) is now represented by Marian Goodman Gallery.

Robert Smithson is an artist who recalibrated the possibilities of art. For over fifty years his work and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown. An autodidact, Smithson’s interests in travel, cartography, geology, architectural ruins, prehistory, philosophy, science-fiction, popular culture, and language spiral through his work. He was fascinated by concepts of duality, entropy, and questions of how we might find our place in the world. In his short and prolific life, Smithson produced paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural schemes, films, photographs, writings, earthworks, and all the stops between. From his landmark earthworks Spiral Jetty (1970) and Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), which celebrate their fiftieth anniversary this year, to his ‘quasi-minimalist’ sculptures, nonsites, writings, projects and proposals, collages, detailed drawings, and radical rethinking of landscape, Smithson’s ideas are profoundly urgent for our times.

The partnership between Holt/Smithson Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery marks a return. In 1965 Marian Goodman was a founder of Multiples, Inc., a landmark project publishing prints, multiples, and books by leading American artists – including Robert Smithson. Holt/Smithson Foundation is dedicated to continuing the creative and investigative spirit of both Smithson and Nancy Holt (1938-2014), who willed the Foundation into being. Holt married Smithson in 1963, and managed the Estate of Robert Smithson from 1973 until her death in 2014. Holt/Smithson Foundation has been active since 2018.

To celebrate this new partnership a solo exhibition of Smithson’s works will launch at Marian Goodman Gallery, London. Titled Hypothetical Islands, this will be the first exhibition dedicated to Smithson in the United Kingdom. Dates will be announced on the websites of the Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Lisa Le Feuvre, inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation says: “Robert Smithson is an incomparable artist whose work has laid the ground for the art of today. Demanding that we look harder and think deeper about how we understand our place on the planet, Smithson is a powerful voice for our times. Our role at Holt/Smithson Foundation is to care for his creative legacies, and we are proud to be working with Marian Goodman. We share a commitment to demonstrating why art is a necessary and urgent part of the world.“

Philipp Kaiser, Chief Executive Director of Artists and Programs at Marian Goodman Gallery, says: “It seems to be the right moment in time to reevaluate and amplify Robert Smithson’s incredible legacy and his far-reaching impact on generations of artists. Among others, this includes Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, and Adrian Villar Rojas. Given the history of Marian Goodman, who worked with the artist in the late 1960s on various multiples, I am very pleased that Smithson’s powerful voice returns to the gallery.”