Happy Birthday, Robert Morris!

The body in space - this could be summed up Robert Morris' life theme. He became famous in 1961 in New York with his Two Columns: Two head-high, hollow plywood columns, one vertical, one horizontal. As the viewer to such acts counterparts, body awareness which forms the simple trigger with him, it was Morris' central question. Similarly, later worked four years of his famous L-Beams: L-shaped plywood sculpture by the artist in different installation at White Cube and arranged for him should ennoble the final pillar saints of recent art history.

Morris's revolutionary conception of the relation space-body sculpture he manifested in 1966 in his famous article "Notes on Sculpture" in the magazine Artforum, the strong interest of the former generation of artists to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception "was reflected. It is not surprising that Morris' sculptures bit weird human attached: from dance and performance coming and the Judson Dance Theater with Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer active, he left in 1961 a pillar on the stage overturn as impotent - just as if he anticipate that Michael Fried's critical thesis that minimal art pick up with their theatricality, the distance between work and viewer.

And Morris himself did not stop easily. While Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin, which are mentioned in minimal anthologies with him like in the same breath, and their previously developed formula for success remained loyal, spun Morris the thread ever - of mirrored cubes that challenge the interactivity of the viewer, about Land Art-structure in the form of craters and steaming outdoor areas to felt strips that fall from the wall and have long since among the incunabula of the anti-shape. That Morris's artistic strategies to this day remains, while still constantly developing new forms, recently demonstrated his exhibition at Sprüth Magers Berlin? Twelve works were presented in 2009 from the created blindfolded drawing series Blind Time Drawings, the Morris has started 1973 - and to this day for surprises is good. Today, Robert Morris is 80 years old.


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