Solveig Ovstebo

In 2015 the Renaissance Society presented an exhibition of newly commissioned works by Los Angeles-based artist Mathias Poledna. Coinciding with the museum’s centennial, it marked the final show in the institution’s first hundred years. For this project Poledna used the notion of iconoclasm and its various historical contexts as a conceptual backdrop for two new works: a 35-mm film installation, co-produced with and premiering at the Renaissance Society, and a substantial alteration to the gallery space: the demolition, dismantling and removal of the gallery’s ceiling structure, a steel truss grid that had horizontally bisected the double-height gallery since 1967. This catalog—featuring a cover designed by artist Peter Downsbrough—documents the exhibition and its installation, and in doing so celebrates a century of the Renaissance Society.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, Let me consider it from here features color reproductions of artworks by Saul Fletcher, Brook Hsu, and Tetsumi Kudo and transcriptions of the audio works of Constance DeJong, alongside newly commissioned poems by Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Simone White, and Lynn Xu, and an epilogue by Solveig Øvstebø. These artists frequently draw from their own histories, humors, and instincts as they grapple with or reimagine what’s happening in the world around them. Across a range of mediums, their works open up spaces that oscillate between strange and familiar, registering deeply personal experiences as well as more ambient cultural and political pressures. Their practices are all similarly anchored in solitude and stretch outward to meet the world, guiding us to the liminal realms between the public and the intimate, the concrete and the fantastical.

Over a fifty-year career, Robert Grosvenor has produced a body of work that is at once solidly physical and conceptual, muscular and fluid. Grosvenor frequently uses industrial materials and found objects as he experiments with texture and scale, resulting in sculptures that reveal a handmade quality and subtle vein of humor. In 2017, the Renaissance Society presented an exhibition of the sculptor’s untitled work from 1989 to 1990. Re-contextualized within a spare architectural installation, this assemblage of materials and found objects eludes interpretation at the same time as it asserts its form and construction. Such nuances, combined with its ambiguous scale, evoke what critic John Yau has suggested is the labor of an “anonymous worker.” Grosvenor has made significant contributions as a sculptor over the past fifty years, but relatively few books have been published about his work. This monograph documents the Renaissance Society show and also features new scholarship considering Grosvenor’s work with a broad scope. The text includes contributions by Yves-Alain Bois, Bruce Hainley, Susan Howe, John Yau, and Renaissance Society executive director and chief curator Solveig Øvstebø.