Napa, California
Robert Kinmont’s recent one-person show, “Trying to Understand Where I Grew Up,” was a mini-retrospective with works from his early years in the 1970s through pieces created as recently last year. Kinmont, one of the California Conceptualists, rose to prominence in the ’70s, then dropped out of the art world in the ’80s and, for about 20 years, studied Buddhism and made his living as a carpenter. Around 2000, he returned to making sculpture, and he still lives and works in Sonoma, California—an important factor for work that explores the peculiarities of place and the human relationship with nature. “Trying to Understand Where I Grew Up” evoked the very particular landscape around Bishop, on the eastern side of California, about halfway between Yosemite and Death Valley. It’s cowboy country—rough scrabble ranches and desolate high desert—where you can see for miles, with the Eastern Sierra Mountains towering on the horizon. …see the entire review in the print version of June’s Sculpture magazine.
