The Astronomer (Burning Planet Series) (Primary Title)

“A sense of doom has gathered on the horizon of our perceptions and grows everyday.” —Robert Morris

A generation older than Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo, Morris emerged in the 1960s with the Minimalist and Conceptual artists who has dismissed painting in favor of reduced geometric structures and alternative media such as performance art and earthworks. (Morris’s untitled felt piece from 1970 is displayed in a nearby gallery with other examples of Minimalist and Conceptual art.) By the early 1980s, however, he returned to painting and drawing, often combined with massive sculptural and architectural framing elements. These hybrid works embraced heroic scale and an apocalyptic vision of the modern world.

In The Astronomer, an oil-on-canvas resembling a firestorm or cosmic event evokes the glory days of ornately carved frames—casts of skulls, bones, and body parts punctuated by swirling vortexes create an elaborate relief of death, sec, and violence. The work sits on the floor like a ceremonial portal. A steel ring and rod, from which shoots a fiery orb, connote the science of astronomy.

The work is a potent rumination on nuclear holocaust at a time when such a fate loomed large. As such, it also serves as a philosophical comment on the tragic hubris of the Enlightenment: modern science and rationality corrupted to serve the forces of domination. Others find in it a vision of apocalypse as sudden revelation and emancipation: a shedding of the world’s crust to reveal an intangible and infinite universe of spirit and pure consciousness.