Robert Smithson in Europe opens this weekend at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop in Germany. The opening celebration will begin at 2pm on⁠ Saturday, September 27, 2025.

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. In 1968/69, he visited the premises of the Gutehoffnungshütte (“Good Hope Ironworks”) in Oberhausen, together with the photographer Bernd Becher (1931–2007) and the gallerist Konrad Fischer (1939–1996), to collect slag—the stony waste material separated from metals during smelting, deposited as byproducts from the region's historical iron and steel industries. Bottrop is located not far from the historical site: situated between coal and sand pits, it is uniquely shaped by mining and the steel industry.

Robert Smithson in Europe is developed in close cooperation with the Foundation and is curated by Markus Karstieß, artist and professor at the 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. Markus Karstieß and Eva Schmidt developed research towards this project during their 2021 Research Fellowship at the Foundation. 

Robert Smithson in Europe will be on view through February 22, 2026.