Marian Goodman Will Represent the Estate of Land Art Pioneer Robert Smithson, Who Left Behind a Trove of Never-Before-Seen Work

Blue-chip gallerist Marian Goodman has been chosen to represent
the estate of the late American artist Robert Smithson.

The news coincides with the 50th anniversary of Smithson’s most
famous work, the Spiral Jetty, an earthwork
constructed in April 1970 in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

To celebrate the partnership between the gallery and
the Santa Fe-based Holt/Smithson Foundation, which
oversees the estates of Smithson and his late wife, artist Nancy
Holt, Marian Goodman will organize a solo exhibition at her
London Gallery this May. It will be the first-ever solo show of
Smithson’s work in the city, said Lisa Le Feuvre, the foundation’s
executive director.

“Without question, Robert Smithson’s work feels even more
important now than ever,” Le Feuvre told Artnet News. “It’s
complicated to think about where the work begins and ends. It’s
about ideas, about possibilities, and recalibrating how we think
about our place on the planet.”

The move comes as mega-galleries such as Hauser & Wirth and Pace
have been adding artists and estates at a furious pace. By
comparison, Marian Goodman has kept her stable modest. But the
gallery said it partnership was a natural fit. “Marian Goodman
has a history with Smithson,” says Philipp Kaiser, the
gallery’s chief executive director of artists and
programs. In 1965, Goodman was a founder of Multiples, a
landmark publishing arm that produced prints, multiples, and books
by top American artists.

“Smithson’s ideas are so crucial for many of the Marian Goodman
gallery’s artists, including Tacita Dean—who did a few pieces about
Smithson—Pierre Huyghe, and Adrián Villar Rojas, who were
extremely influenced by his practice,” Kaiser says. “He’s one of
the best artists of the 20th century, an artist’s artist. His ideas
about environmentalism, entropy, decay, ruin, and science fiction,
which he combined together with a compelling vision, are very
timely.”

As a curator, and prior to joining the Marian Goodman gallery
after more than 20 years in the museum world, Kaiser organized the
seminal 2012 Land Art show “Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974,”
which was shown at MoCA in Los Angeles and the Haus der Kunst in
Munich.

Holt inherited Smithson’s sizable output of works upon his death
in 1973, and oversaw the estate for decades afterward. Many of the
artworks have never been seen by the public. Le Feuvre says some of
them will be available for sale, and the goal is to eventually gift
works to important collections.

An additional interesting fact? The plan is to eventually wind
down the foundation around 2038, the centenary of the artist’s
birth.

“Why does an artist-endowed foundation even exist?” Le
Feuvre asks. “To get people talking about an artist and keep
that conversation going. If an artist’s foundation is going to
be successful, you don’t want to be cheerleading until the end of
time. You want to make yourself obsolete.”

The post Marian Goodman Will Represent the Estate of Land
Art Pioneer Robert Smithson, Who Left Behind a Trove of
Never-Before-Seen Work appeared first on artnet
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