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Indepth Arts News:
"ROBERT GOBER: Sculpture + Drawing"
2000-06-09 until 2000-09-05
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, CA,
USA
Organized by the Walker Art Center, this first large-scale overview of Gober's
oeuvre juxtaposes more than 100 drawings with examples of his sculpture,
illuminating the complex psychological and formal roots of this important
contemporary artist's work. Grappling with themes of childhood, memory, loss
and sexuality, Gober explores a variety of mediums that probe the legacies of
Surrealism, Minimalism and Conceptualism.
Robert Gober is a uniquely American artist. His images evolve from our everyday
domestic lives and are transformed into haunting objects that live in the twilight
separating the actual from the dreamed. In his sculptures, the ordinary becomes
slightly strange, and a subtle dose of unease is injected into the mundane.
Born in Wallingford, Connecticut, in 1954, the artist attended Middlebury College in
Vermont before moving to Manhattan in 1976. While his original ambition was to be a
painter, he abandoned this goal in 1983 and turned his attention to sculpture. He
first came to prominence as an artist in the mid-1980s, with a body of work that
explored countless variations on the form of a simple domestic sink. Since then his
work has rarely strayed from the portrayal of easily recognizable subjects, such as
drains, doors, children's furniture, and the human body. However, Gober's sculpture
is never precisely what it appears to be, and he uses its apparent simplicity to
explore such complex themes as childhood, home, sexuality, victimization, religion,
and transcendence.
Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing examines the artist's vocabulary of forms, and
the recurrence of certain images throughout his entire body of work. While this
exhibition provides a visible link between his use of sculpture and drawing, it also
brings into focus his unique personal archive of subject matter and the tenacity with
which he expands upon it. By repeatedly reworking his source imagery, Gober
transposes his iconic forms from the realm of the recognizable into that of the
profoundly enigmatic.
Drawing has been an integral part of Robert Gober's sculptural practice since the
early 1980s. He has used this medium very specifically as a tool for actualizing ideas,
for working out the physical appearance of the forms running through his mind. The
drawings in this exhibition have most often been rendered prior to or concurrent with
the fabrication of a sculpture, but occasionally Gober creates them after the sculpture
has been completed. While he often uses this medium to figure out which possible
variations of a form to pursue in three dimensions, his drawings should not be
necessarily be thought of as studies for their sculptural relatives.
Throughout his increasingly diverse body of drawings and sculptures, Gober exhibits
a fascination with the formal and psychological resonance of the commonplace.
Sometimes images appear only once in his drawings. In other instances, as in his
series of sink drawings, Gober conducts a more obsessive and sustained
investigation.
Issues of representation and scale can be seen in models for sculptures of a sink
drain, a crib, and a stick of butter. The resulting works offer no indication of the
complex process by which they were created. A sculpture entitled Bag of Donuts
(1989), for instance, presents itself as a simple replica of its subject. In reality, the
artist went through a meticulous process of deep-frying, degreasing, and scientifically
stabilizing the donuts, as well as hand-crafting the paper bag that contains them. In
Gober's work, there is a continual tension between what an object appears to be and
what it actually is, a congenial opposition of the familiar and the irrational.
IMAGE:
Robert Gober
Untitled
1990
Wax, cotton, wood,
leather shoe and human
hair
10-3/4 x 20-1/2 x 5-5/8
Coll: Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden
Photo credit:
Lee
Stalsworth/Ricardo Blanc
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