Robert Wilson, the pioneering avant-garde theater director and visible artist finest identified for his genre-defying work in opera, theater, and design, died on July thirty first in Water Mill, New York. He was 83. In accordance with Watermill Heart, the humanities house that Wilson based, the artist died after “a quick however acute sickness”.
A defining determine of the New York experimental scene within the Nineteen Sixties, Wilson earned worldwide recognition for his radical, multidisciplinary method to efficiency. In 1976, he collaborated with composer Philip Glass on Einstein on the Seaside, a landmark opera that broke with conventional narrative constructions and established Wilson as a serious power in modern theater.
All through his decades-long profession, Wilson challenged the conventions of time, house, and storytelling onstage. His productions usually built-in gradual, deliberate motion with hanging visible tableaux, drawing from literary sources, historic biographies, and nonverbal communication. One in every of his best-known tasks was Deafman Look (1971), a silent opera developed with Raymond Andrews, a deaf and mute boy whom Wilson adopted. Different main works included The CIVIL warS (1984), a multipart opera that was initially supposed to accompany the 1984 Olympics; and White Raven (1991), created in collaboration with the musician Lou Reed.
Wilson’s affect prolonged past the stage. He produced video works, installations, drawings, and sculptural furnishings, and labored carefully with a variety of collaborators, together with musician Tom Waits, efficiency artist Marina Abramović, and German author Heiner Müller. In 1992, he based The Watermill Heart, an interdisciplinary arts hub in Lengthy Island that continues to help efficiency, schooling, and worldwide cultural alternate.
Wilson was represented by Paula Cooper Gallery together with Galerie Thomas Schülte and Thaddaeus Ropac. These galleries exhibited his work throughout media, together with drawing, sculpture, video, and set design, highlighting Wilson’s deeply interdisciplinary imaginative and prescient.
“We’re grateful for a few years of collaboration with this really sensible interdisciplinary artist,” Paula Cooper Gallery mentioned in an announcement.
