Join author Mathieu Copeland for a conversation with Professor Sarah Wilson to mark the launch of Copeland’s new book, Robert Barry – The Defining of It…, the first comprehensive monograph to explore the complete body of work by one of contemporary art’s most influential figures. Spanning Barry’s formative years as a student of Robert Motherwell and later Tony Smith at Hunter College to his pivotal role in shaping two major artistic revolutions – Minimal and Conceptual Art – this landmark publication offers an unprecedented look at the artist’s evolution and legacy. Realised in close collaboration with the artist and published by König, this book centres on an extensive text by Mathieu Copeland. Alongside this comprehensive and critical analysis, the publication brings together a wide-ranging selection of largely unpublished images drawn from international collections and the artist’s own archives.
Robert Barry was born in 1936 in New York City and lives in New Jersey. His works was included in major exhibitions such as Lawrence Alloway’s Systemic Painting (1966), Harald Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Form (1969), and Documenta V, VI, and VII in Kassel (1972, 1977, and 1982), and the subject of numerous solo presentations, including at the Tate Gallery, London (1972); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1974); the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1977); the Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco (1978); the Renaissance Society, Chicago (1985); and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2001). In 2003–2004, a retrospective of his works from 1963 to 1975 was presented at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany, and the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland. Dr. Copeland curated a major retrospective of his work in 2023–2024 at Circuit, Lausanne, and the Fondation Venet, Le Muy.
Organised by Sarah Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Courtauld Institute.
Speakers:
Dr Mathieu Copeland has developed a curatorial practice that subverts traditional notions of the exhibition. He co‑curated VOIDS. A Retrospective (Centre Pompidou; Kunsthalle Bern, 2009) and co‑edited the accompanying anthology. He has curated retrospectives on Graciela Carnevale, Robert Barry, Gustav Metzger, Phill Niblock, and Alan Vega, and exhibitions including A Staged Exhibition (2021), A Retrospective of Closed Exhibitions (2016), A Choreographed Exhibition (2008) and A Spoken Word Exhibition (2007). Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University School of Arts, he has edited more than twenty‑five books, including Gustav Metzger: Writings, The Anti-Museum and Choreographing Exhibitions.
Sarah Wilson is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute. Co-curator of Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968 (Royal Academy London, 2002), she published The Visual World of French Theory, vol. 1, Figurations in 2010 (French, 2018), and Picasso, Marx and socialist realism in France, 2013. She won the international AICA Critics prize in 2015. Wilson launched the masters special option ‘Global Conceptualism. The last avant-garde or a new beginning?’ in 2011, which is spearheaded by Mallarmé, Duchamp, Yves Klein and Joseph Kosuth, and has since supervised connected MA theses dealing with conceptual and post-conceptual art from the Cold War period to the present, and from Mexico to the Philippines.
