DiAlogs: Designed & Found Objects, 1960s-2020s
DiAlogs is the largest North American exhibition devoted to Robert Wilson’s three-dimensional works since the landmark 1991 retrospective Robert Wilson’s Vision. Bringing together Wilson’s sculptures, stage-derived editions, and found objects from his collection, the exhibition spans more than six decades from the 1960s through the 2020s, offering a broad overview of the artist’s object-based practice.
Opening one year after Wilson’s passing, DiAlogs reconsiders the sculptural works he conceived for the stage, objects long understood within the context of his theater yet equally recognized as singular contributions to post-war sculpture, architecture and design. Together with the found objects, they reveal the reciprocal relationship between what is discovered and what is created, demonstrating that collecting, arranging, composing and staging were not ancillary activities but central artistic strategies that shaped Wilson’s work as profoundly as drawing, sculpture, architecture and theater itself.
Spanning more than half a century of Wilson’s career, the exhibition assembles works that first fully came to life in the theater. Conceived for the stage and later realized as autonomous sculptures and editions, these objects retain the precision and poetry of their origins while eisting as independent works of art.
Wilson’s life-long engagement with found objects also situates his work within a broader history of modern art. From the Surrealists’ embrace of the objet-trouvé as a catalyst for unexpected associations to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the found object has occupied a central place in 20th-century artistic practice. Wilson’s relationship to found materials, however, was fundamentally different—rather than presenting them as isolated conceptual gestures, Wilson gathered vernacular artifacts as elements within an evolving visual language. At the Watermill Center, these objects enter into carefully orchestrated relationships with sculpture, furniture, architecture, landscape and performance, creating spaces in which diverse cultures, histories, materials and forms coexist.
The exhibition was curated by Noah Khoshbin in collaboration with the artist collective Fisher Bradford.
“Wilson shares a lineage with Donald Judd and Isamu Noguchi, who in America opened the space between sculpture, architecture, furniture, and lived experience. What sets Wilson’s three-dimensional work apart is where it developed: yes, in the studio, whether at 147 Spring or at the Watermill Center, but these were and are multidisciplinary spaces, or simply put, stages—stagings that occured before the work entered a public theater. The stage was his studio, a place of continual intervention where scale, proportion, material, light, movement and silence could be explored and reimagined. Sculpture was always one of his essential languages, woven through everything he created.”