Peter Downsbrough (1940–2024)

Conceptual artist, photographer, and filmmaker Peter Downsbrough, whose spare, communicative works blended architecture and typography to engage and fundamentally alter space, died on August 10 in Brussels, where he had lived since 1989. He was eighty-four. His death was announced by Boston’s Krakow Witkin Gallery, which represented him. “Downsbrough’s works are markers that define the intersections between the conditions and experience of their construction and perception,” wrote curator Ann Goldstein inReconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975.“Rather than describing a situation, they concretize, fragment, and intervene in the process and conditions of representation. They do not delineate a place but the conditions of place.”

Peter Downsbrough was born in 1940 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Originally studying architecture in college, he abandoned the field to become a sculptor. He enjoyed his first solo show in New York, at Area gallery, in 1961 and continued to work largely in this metier until the late 1960s, when, as Margaret Sundell succinctly put it in a 2003 issue ofArtforum, he “dispensed with the production of traditional art objects in favor of a phenomenological exploration of space, through photography, site-specific interventions, and artist’s books as well as audio works and CD-roms.”

Characteristic of his newly diversified practice—which additionally included collage, video, maps, scale models, and typographic design—were works that asked viewers to resituate themselves in order to make sense of them. Many of the works that demanded this featured letters, arranged to form words if viewed from certain angles. Other works, such as spatial interventions featuring parallel dowels or lengths of pipe, invited viewers to reconsider space itself. These parallel lines appeared in other formats, including his artist’s books, where their positioning, on page after page, seemed not to embody any specific logic, and thus clamored to be decoded, as in his 2009Two Lines,Three Sections.

As a film- and video maker, Downsbrough embraced a similarly minimalist aesthetic, apparent in works such as 1983’sNow With in Three Parts, a stark paean to the simple action of throwing dice; and 2004’sHere, which uses the black-and-white grids of urban architecture to explore social and governmental structures. Despite having left behind the practice of architecture, he remained fascinated by urban space, which he framed in his films and videos in a manner that, much like his aforementioned interventions, called for a reapprehension of space and structure.

Downsbrough’s work is held in the collections of major arts institutions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery Library, London; Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; Centre Pompidou and Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, both in Paris; Le Consortium, Centre d’Art, Dijon, France; FRAC Lorraine, Metz, France; SMAK, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium; Weserburg Musum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; and Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland.

“People at times have said, ‘Well, you’re part of the Minimalist movement,” he toldRadio Web MACBAin 2019. “But I always say, no, I’m not a Minimalist, I’m a maximalist. I can’t do more than I do,” he concluded. “I’m doing the maximum.”