A man standing next to a compost heap holding a mirror beside his leg, which reflects a woman holding a camera

Robert Smithson in Europe at Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany

Robert Smithson in Europe  is currently on show at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop in Germany, on view through February 22, 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 Rhineland and the Ruhr region local to the city of Bottrop. Robert Smithson in Europe includes significant works from international museums and from the Foundation’s collection, including the 1969 works Essen Soil and Mirrors, Chalk-Mirror Displacement, and works relating to the 1971 earthwork Broken Circle/Spiral Hill.

Smithson’s sculptures and installations from the late 1960s onwards address conditions of place, entropy and relationships between humans and nature, industry and the environment. He realized some of his most important works in Europe, and was fascinated by the NRW region’s geological and industrial heritage.

Robert Smithson in Europe is developed in close cooperation with the Foundation and curated by Markus Karstieß, artist and professor at Koblenz University of Applied Sciences, Dr. Eva Schmidt, art historian and former director of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, and Monja Droßmann, curator of the Josef Albers Museum. Karstieß and Schmidt developed research towards this project during their 2021 Research Fellowship at the Foundation. 

Robert Smithson constructing Mirror Displacement on a Compost Heap (1969)
For Prospect 69, Düsseldorf, Germany
Photograph: Nancy Holt
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Archived News

Robert Smithson looking at the camera from the back of a stationwagon loaded with rocks

Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson

 "Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson" launches at Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles on November 8, 2025, with an opening reception between 6 – 8 pm and on show until January 24, 2026. In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” This exhibition takes him at his word and invites eighteen artists to join Smithson on the floor as partners who resist, improvise, and extend the rhythm of his thinking.

two people looking through sculptural seeing devices at black circular shapes painted on a white wall

Holt's "Locators with Loci" on view in "Minimal" at the Bourse de Commerce

Nancy Holt's 1972 sculpture Locators with Loci is on view in the exhibition Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris on show through January 18, 2026. Curated by Jessica Morgan, Director of Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition traces the diversity of this Minimal Art since the 1960s through over a hundred works by some forty international artists, many from the Pinault Collection.

a sunset at spiral jetty on the great salt lake paired with a view of an earthwork at a sand quarry

From Dawn till Dusk 2025

We are proud to partner with Land Art Lives, in collaboration with Land Art Contemporary, Land Arts of the American West, to present the second edition of a special livestream conversation between two iconic earthworks by Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty (1970) and Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971).