ROBERT GUILLOT | Objecthood
March 5 - April 7, 2023
“He can make anything out of anything.” That was often said of the sculptor Robert Guillot. In a studio equipped with seemingly every tool and material, he invented processes using spandex, concrete, wax, fiberglass, and dentists’ alginate. To realize a chair he conceived in graduate school, he taught himself to upholster, and to machine his own screws. When he designed a fountain, he designed mechanics as well as form. He was a problem solver, who pioneered ways to build miniature gliders that set records for weight and distance. He wanted things to be made perfectly, yet never wanted craft to be conspicuous. He valued honesty in making.
Skillful as Robert Guillot was, he made works, like some shown here, in which craft and engineering are virtually absent. In his later work especially, seeing was primary. Some indelible pieces are piles of stones, arrangements of driftwood, or other found things placed in relationship to one another. He treasured certain objects in themselves for their presence: a small plastic couch, a tiny jointed figurine, a miniature awning. He once defined sculpture as something with “permanence,” that “doesn’t need a person to complete it.” In the last months of his life, unable to work with his hands, he designed books of photographs that documented his arrangements of objects on shelves. These groupings of small forms have humor, pathos, and eccentric elegance. They “explore the nature of objecthood itself, asking questions about what may, or may not, constitute a ‘thing.’”
Robert Guillot (1953-2020) was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He studied at the Memphis College of Art and received his MFA from Yale University. Guillot’s work was shown in solo and group exhibitions at 57W57Arts (New York); Sideshow Gallery (Brooklyn); Jack Shainman Gallery (New York); Magasin 3 (Stockholm, Sweden); The Stedelijk Museum (Netherlands); Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago); and Marian Goodman Gallery (New York.) Guillot was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1981), a MacDowell residency (1992), and a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship to Yaddo (1992). His work was reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The Yale Architecture Journal. Guillot moved to Brooklyn in 1980, where he worked, first in Greenpoint and then in Bushwick, for forty years.
BACK ROOM
ROBERT GUILLOT | ...over and all about
November 3 - December 15, 2017
Installed in the gallery’s Back Room viewing space, Robert Guillot will present … over and all about, a multi-part arrangement of the artist’s small-scale sculptural objects. Guillot’s enchantingly odd shapes and forms are enigmatic, enveloping a figurative, bodily essence while drifting into curious abstraction. The collective placement and presentation of these objects creates a specific terrain, a nimbly morphing landscape of accumulated parts. In speaking of his process, Guillot states: “Things arranged, again and again, over and under and in between. Together they create a visual rhythm, and this rhythm is EVERYTHING.”
Robert Guillot was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1953. He studied at the Memphis College of Art and received his MFA at Yale University. Guillot’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Sideshow Gallery (Brooklyn); Jack Shainman Gallery (New York); Magasin 3 (Stockholm, Sweden); and The Stedelijk Museum (Netherlands). Guillot is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1981) and a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship (1992). Past residencies included Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Guillot’s work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Artforum, The Yale Architecture Journal, The New York Times and The Village Voice.