MGK Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) is one of the best-known representatives of Land Art. His site-specific landscape sculpture in the Great Salt Lake, Utah – the “Spiral Jetty” – has become a true icon, although a part was played in this by the film of the same name that fluctuates between fiction and documentary. Having died in a tragic plane crash at the age of only 35, the artist has subsequently become a legend as well.

His second major landscape work was produced in Europe in 1971, on the occasion of the exhibition “Sonsbeek 71” near the Dutch town of Emmen. In the context of this work entitled “Broken Circle/Spiral Hill” Smithson also formulated his ideas for a film in writing and drawings, and indeed he had already made some initial recordings. After forty years, now Nancy Holt – Smithson’s widow and herself an artist – has completed this film in collaboration with Land Art Contemporary and SKOR (Foundation for Art and Public Domain), Amsterdam. In the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the film “Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill” will be shown for the first time in Germany in the context of photographs, drawings and other films.
The exhibition presents a total of five films, 30 drawings and numerous photographs. It particularly highlights the links between landscape sculpture and film in the work of Robert Smithson.