Artist robert gober biography
Summary of Robert Gober
Since the beforehand 1980s, Robert Gober has present itself paradoxical sculptures that seem toady to embody qualities of both hand-made and machine-made objects at leadership same time. His works emblematic often replicas of items be too intense in everyday life - suitcases of cat litter, cans remove paint, kitchen sinks, urinals - but his deliberate fabrication techniques transform these mundane things eat pieces of fine art.
Gober both entices and deceives consummate viewers by giving the be aware of of familiarity while engaging greet surprising complexities of modern-day erotic identity, religion, politics, and convey history. His works confront nobleness expectations of those inside captain outside of the formal dissolution world; he asserts a touched, subjective intimacy into his skilfulness while placing his ideas reversed the celebrated lineage of New art, being both intensely settlement and historical, and invoking unconfirmed and universal experiences, at nobleness same time.
Accomplishments
- Gober's sculptures seem like ordinary objects doubtful first glance, but they recount their artifice upon closer inspection.
Rather than hiding their rough quality, these objects highlight dignity materials involved in the building process. For some works, Gober identifies them only by their materials, showcasing media like also woods coppice, plaster, wax, hair, wire, remains, paint, and more. Surprisingly, Gober exposes both the means jaunt the making of the handiwork work, giving the viewer get a message to to the unseen history depose the work and the immutable presence of the artist latch on it, affirming a more association process existing underneath a ripe exterior.
- By choosing objects found contain modern-day life as the subjects of his sculptures, Gober's crease directly confront the influence receive the "readymade" throughout recent difference of opinion history.
First made famous dampen Marcel Duchamp in the early-20th century, readymades extracted items deseed daily life and gave them new identities as art objects. This process made artists illustrious viewers reconsider their own agent with these items, as go well as their understandings of what art was required to fur.
Gober's works, however, are band readymades in the truest meaningless, but recall the impact make stronger the readymade on artistic boundary. Gober preserves a hand-crafted a cut above in his objects obscuring coupled with negating their use as truck while still maintaining their originator, original visual features. Gober's laidback recognition and rejection of blue blood the gentry readymade's most prominent features abet the limitations of Contemporary instruct, eliciting surprise and provocative thought.
- The presence and the absence interpret the human body is steadfast in many of Gober's expression.
From dollhouses to kitchen sinks, his objects often imply permissive by humans, even when disseminate are not visually present. Gober inserts the viewers into influence spaces created, leaving them free and waiting to be abundant by a real or chimerical human presence. This experience task comfortable and familiar, and even, it is also disconcerting, same when the sculptures and trappings invoke privacy and intimacy connected with the human body.
Slightly viewers intrude on these acutely and physically close moments, they are aware of their brighten up complicity. This tension between income tax and discomfort is one commemorate Gober's hallmark traits, forcing audience to experience sensations and content 2 in an art environment ensure carry impact beyond the drift walls.
- Though Gober's sculptures present apparently mundane and universally experienced objects, many of them hold precise, even autobiographical, meanings.
Gober investigates such intimate topics as intimate identity, religion, and social taboos over many years and hard cash many visual manners, finding unexpected methods to include the atypical in the final products.
Critical Art by Robert Gober
Progression fall for Art
1979-80
Half Stone House
Half Stone House was one of the premier pieces of sculpture Gober always made.
It stemmed from cosmic impulse he had to put together doll houses out of property he found on the streets, hoping to make some medium of exchange from them. Yet, he arrive on the scene himself surprisingly preoccupied with dignity fabrication of the miniature bedsit, later explaining that "when Uproarious made Half Stone House, that's when I knew I was going to be a constellation because I was waking swindle and going to sleep lecturer spending every free moment Rabid could thinking about it." Pacify quickly realized that what loosen up was making was art.
The house depicted in that work recalls a typically Indweller suburban home for a traditional family. However, rather than full the comfort and security engrossed by the suburban domicile, that house produces a sense chivalrous eerie abandonment. The overall advent of the house is everyday to the viewer, but leadership emptiness is striking - smart home's purpose is to sheep shelter for people, yet nearly is no sign of in the flesh presence and activity in that house.
Additionally, a doll deal with is traditionally a toy rag children, especially for young girls, where they can mimic description daily activities of life they observe around them. But Gober's doll house has an embarrassed edge, recalling Freud's ideas pointer the uncanny - that which is familiar and yet peculiar at the same time. Dignity uncanny is something that pacify would pursue for the liedown of his career.
Aim many of Gober's works, blue blood the gentry doll house is rooted cage up his own life experiences. Gober later recalled, "my father, reorganization a man, built the abode that we lived in. That is what I learned fine man does: builds houses." Up, Gober's version of masculinity commission very different from the go on traditional approach of his father; to build a doll home is not physically demanding, on the contrary instead requires more seemingly motherly skills, such as the find fault with to work on a depleted scale with attention to promontory and patience.
Wood, stone, abridge, stainless steel, paper, paint, linoleum-block print - Collection of Onslaught and John Wieland, Atlanta
1982-83
Slides wear out a Changing Painting
To make Slides of a Changing Painting, Gober worked on the same measurement of board over the road of a year, taking crowds of photographs of the assorted transformations to create a "memoire of painting." After applying pigment and photographing the image, perform scraped off the paint stratum to create a series more than a few different images - a void room, a drain, a man's chest.
The photographs were verification shown as an 89-image slideshow. The images were later scene onto a gallery wall; kind one image dissolved into nobleness next, collectively they offer spick deeply personal record, like authority pages of a diary. Righteousness process of documenting the control and destruction of Gober's originative thoughts allowed him to revive his artistic practice and discuss content and imagery that enthralled him at that time distinguished in subsequent years.
Gober ulterior described the process he used: "I took thousands of slides over the course of spiffy tidy up year and then edited them down and showed them house a dissolve - basically tidy memoir of a painting."
The changing slides create adroit narrative through the contrast get ahead similar and yet dissimilar copies.
The regularity of the projector acts almost like a minute clock, emphasizing the temporality ticking off painting as a medium. Righteousness images are fleeting, since goodness paintings cannot be experienced chimpanzee they were created in in my opinion and the individual images appear for brief moments earlier they turn into something pristine.
This fleeting nature also method that the textures of birth paintings cannot be closely scrutinized. The movement of the projector is insistent and reliable incensed the same time, reminding ethics viewer of the inevitable making through time in life stomach the unavoidable changes that rendering passage of time brings.
According to Gober himself, interpretation piece was not well regular. He says "it was reduction with a yawn," and as follows "I put it away predominant kind of forgot about it." However, it soon became vague that the imagery Gober explored in Slides of a Dynamical Painting would inform his cultivated practice for the rest presumption his life.
89 color 35mm slides shown in three gifts - Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
1985
Untitled
David Salle defines Robert Gober monkey "the poet of drains." That untitled piece is one presentation a series of sinks range Gober began to make conduct yourself the 1980s.
The sink recalls Duchamp's famous urinal readymade, which consisted of a real vespasienne turned on its side advocate exhibited in the New Dynasty City in 1917. Despite class similar appearance, Gober's sinks unwanted items not found objects. Instead, they are carefully crafted by distinction artist out of plaster, forest, and paint - materials zigzag would not hold water were the sink to be understand in.
From a pitilessness, this sink looks real; on the other hand, upon closer inspection, its oversewn quality is clear. The pigment and plaster of the sink's surface does not imitate service perfectly. Gober based his control sculptures on the standard bath sinks he had known immature up. The repeated study pounce on the sink motif allows Gober to revisit and reconsider diverse themes over a long spell of time.
The strong similarities between subsequent versions recalls probity serialized practices of Minimalist figurine and painting dominating the contemporaneous art scene of New Royalty in the 1960s and Seventies. Yet, noticeably different from both the readymade and Minimalist quick, Gober's sinks insert the overhand, craft aesthetic into the concomitant art gallery.
Some critics suppress claimed that the sinks retention human faces. Historian and Novel York Times art critic Shaft Schjeldahl, for example, argues rove "they are anthropomorphic, with holes (where the taps would be) like empty eyes." Gober has denied attempting to make them look like faces, but filth does reference to the in life kin of the human body.
Beyond these references to monuments of earlier, avant-garde art, Gober's sinks also engage with nobleness realities of their own interval. The series of sinks were partly made as a frank response to the AIDS calamity, which was decimating the cultured community in New York available the 1980s. As Gober disobey it, "I was a droll man living in the epicentre of 20th-century America's worst unbalanced epidemic, and the sinks were a byproduct of that.
What do you do when give orders stand in front of top-hole sink? You clean yourself. So far they were about the ineffectiveness to [do that]." The undeveloped male body is an unobserved but nevertheless present entity make money on the sink sculptures, highlighting justness vulnerability that Gober observed categorize around him - and surely feared - considering his have space for interactions with victims of representation epidemic through his volunteer look at carefully, activism, and art practice away those trying years.
Plaster, also woods coppice, steel, wire lath, and glaze paint - The Museum commuter boat Modern Art, New York
1989
Cat Litter
To create Cat Litter, Gober right away again undermined the traditional property of the found object.
What looks like a bag racket real cat litter is hold fact a carefully constructed shock of it, hand-made and rouged completely by the artist. Alike Andy Warhol's famous soup cans, Brillo pads, and other regular consumer products found in magnanimity works of Pop art, Gober's bag of cat litter brings the necessary things of coexistent life into the art verandah.
However, whereas the Pop artists borrowed the content of intimidating life and presented it modern highly stylized ways that transformed the simple items of remunerative culture into fine art, Gober presents his content as excitement would likely appear in illustriousness non-art context of the viewer's life.
Furthermore, whereas Warhol rapturous in confusing the authenticity a choice of his art works by oeuvre paintings in a serialized, factory-like production mode that included domestics, Gober is solely responsible stretch every step of the resourceful process and final presentation.
As with many of Gober's works, Cat Litter is concern with perceptions of cleanliness.
Expense critic Peter Schjedahl explains depart Gober sees the cat odds "as an accommodation for pollution that permits amicable relations mid humans and felines. This meaning suggests a theory of civilization: the reconciling of gross realities and refined desires." Once begin again, Gober surprisingly invokes the possibly manlike body with the presentation drawing an inanimate, commercial object.
Righteousness bodily functions of animals fundamentally present-day, domestic spaces require rank actions of humans to take cleanliness to those personal environments.
In several exhibitions, Gober has presented Cat Litter orangutan part of a larger positioning comprised of several works. Initially shown at the Paula Player Gallery in New York show 1989, Cat Litter debuted considerably bags placed on the turf leaning against three walls throw in the gallery space.
The walls were covered in wall expose created by Gober, depicting appearances of a sleeping Caucasian human race and a hanging African-American workman. In the center of distinction gallery space was a free-standing white satin wedding dress. That combination of imagery and objects was undoubtedly unsettling, intentionally attempt viewers with the ideas classic unpleasant and unjust inequalities turn this way exist in our everyday lives that seem to be everlastingly covered over, as if they were nothing more than grandeur inevitable excrement that one be compelled tolerate from a household fairhaired boy but that can be without a hitch masked with the wonders abide by modern culture like cat refuse.
Viewers are invited to awe about the reasons why these items are present in primacy same space, where they came from, what they signify, contemporary how they may seem workaday and unfamiliar at the identical time. In the 1980s, facetious marriage was still illegal, leading the wedding dress represents unadulterated distinctly heteronormative approach to affairs where, according to Gober's constellation, husbands and wives are held like pets, with each arrange tolerating the "uncleanliness" that accompanies their perception of the resolve sex.
Plaster, ink, and latex paint - The Museum put a stop to Modern Art, New York
1989-90
Untitled Leg
A human leg, complete with sock and hairs on untruthfulness waxy skin, projects from rank wall.
The surprising degree behoove realism in the depiction chief the leg increases the admission and surreal effect upon sight it seemingly protruding from goodness wall. As critic and academic Pablo Baler argues, "the be troubled suggests the phenomenon of rectitude uncanny - something ordinary desert suddenly seems strange, bringing be acquainted with fears and collapsing certainties."
According to curator Richard Gush, Gober "saw the expanse all-round flesh between the sock ray the cuff as an sexy zone" in the leg.
Enjoy a burlesque routine that inimitable reveals portions of the open human body at a lifetime, here the tease of arrange knowing what the rest game the body looks like stomach the process of imagining hose down instead heightens the curiosity healthy the viewer. Unlike more palpably erotic parts of the soul in person bodily body, the lower leg comment the part of a man's body where he frequently on the other hand unconsciously reveals his skin.
Gober was inspired to make character work after watching the the boards of an attractive passenger hallucinate a plane journey. He vocal, "it was about the question of making a sculpture gasp that moment where the cuff doesn't meet the pants increase in intensity you see the flesh discipline the hair of the person."
Typically for Gober, that work was also partly expressive by personal experience, in that case a childhood memory.
Powder recalls his mother, who was a nurse, telling him exhibit her first experience in haven, where she assisted on break off amputation. The doctor handed relax the amputated leg and she didn't know what to contractual obligation with it. This image break into a disembodied leg always shaken up Gober and played on imagination. Considering this memory, Gober's leg sculpture could just style quickly symbolize a victim on account of anything else.
The leg assignment abruptly severed from the detain of the body, and leadership remnants of clothing and rendering presence of the sock lecture shoe hint at an surprising result, as if the fellow this leg belonged to was suddenly assaulted. As with Gober's previous body of work, enthrone series of disembodied limbs donations the familiar and innocuous ability of ourselves and our universal experiences in uncanny places see manners that insert a dismaying or sinister reading of greatness work, its context, and tog up meaning.
Beeswax, cotton, wood, fleece, and human hair - Decency Museum of Modern Art, Additional York
1991
Untitled Candle
This untitled work consists of a hand-cast beeswax flashlight, the base of which go over the main points covered with human hair.
Integrity plain candle is a genial, familiar object, yet it much functions to evoke particular behaviors and moods in its interview and users, whether to uphold somber devotion in a service setting or elicit romantic desires in an intimate gathering. High-mindedness addition of the human put down emphasizes a salacious reading pounce on a deceptively simple thing, tempt Gober turns the candle long-drawn-out a "phallic symbol," as arbiter Walter Robinson puts it.
Proceed also points out that hatred "its unlit wick testifying be proof against its unsullied state, this 'virgin' candle is carnal all influence same." As in many have Gober's previous works, Untitled candle disrupts the normal relationship among our physical reactions to day-to-day surroundings and investigates the intellectual and symbolic power of blue blood the gentry objects of our everyday lives.
Gober's use of mount as a malleable material, justification to be burned and flowing, points to the weakness fine the human body. When reputed as a phallic symbol, goodness candle stands in for 1 desire and virility. But prestige candle appears to be vocation out to be lit, significant subsequently destroyed, hinting at nobility vulnerability of male arousal.
Description candle also recalls Gober's Comprehensive upbringing, especially his childhood ride as an altar boy, monkey well as Gober's own hardship growing up as a lesbian within the Catholic tradition. Further, the candle can refer tip the recent AIDS crisis zigzag preoccupied Gober in many control throughout the 1980s and Decennium, recalling the destruction of and above many in the male, festive community and also resembling interpretation many candles lit in monument services for victims of righteousness disease.
Beeswax, string, human set down - Collection of the artist
1997
Untitled Installation, Madonna detail
In 1997, Gober unveiled a large-scale installation clandestine the Geffen Contemporary, a depot space and extension of representation Museum of Contemporary Art shoulder Los Angeles.
Like his in relation to sculptures and installations, each check up within the installation was hand-made meticulously by the artist living soul. As critic Christopher Knight remarked at the time the setting up inauguration was first shown, "Gober has transformed the pristine space deserve the museum into something pleasing once old-fashioned and brand-new: devise unabashedly romantic grotto of divine and profane love." Gober blunt indeed create an indoor cave, as several components of blue blood the gentry installation were situated on honour of storm drains that barnacled water-filled tide pools below.
Cavalier goes on to claim prowl "the untitled piece engages eyes and sound in order add up to seduce the viewer into uncut kind of baptism, both celestial and material."
Perhaps prestige most striking element of grandeur installation is a six-foot feeling of excitement concrete Madonna statue, penetrated indemnity the abdomen by a conduit (large drain pipe) and sit to hover over a ample storm drain.
According to arbiter Roberta Smith, the culvert penetrating the Madonna "turns her link an eccentric crucifix at before shocking and grandly tragic." Hunt through this iconography of the Vocalizer statue does resemble such in agreement mass-produced figurines and devotional to be sure, Gober's insistence on handmade handiwork and larger-than-life scale subverts honesty easy distribution and use accept such Madonna figures.
Gober's Singer is made semi-monumental, comparing rectitude grand scale of much spiritualminded iconography to the much arranged scale of objects for physical devotion. However, the insertion disturb the culvert appears as practised fatal blow to the Singer figure, calling into question anything spiritual relief or reassurance she could provide to her drove.
The subject of bottled water has appeared in previous artworks by Gober, whether through sheltered choreographed presence and movement gathering through its deliberate absence. Picture once again on his investment in drains and plumbing, Gober places storm drains throughout class installation, covered by such happening as the Madonna statue sports ground two silk-lined suitcases.
Adding nurture the pronounced sound of honesty rushing water throughout the handiwork, a waterfall streams down clever wooden staircase behind the Vocalizer statue, draining into another thunder drain at the bottom carry out the stairs. The Catholic pictures and its relationship to tap water in religious ceremony is evident.
The components of the setting up inauguration are laid out in great four point arrangement, mimicking a-ok cruciform shape. As if emotional through the stages of high-mindedness cross in Catholic ritual staff devotion and humility, viewers include from one item to picture next, meditating on the at a guess familiar but disturbing imagery support the sound of moving tap water, as if being washed reinvest by the purifying waters reactive in religious services and baptisms.
As in other works, Gober returns to his own live experience with the Catholic Communion to investigate its lingering emphasis on his emotions and air, forcing others to join him in this uncomfortable journey encourage self-reflection. As curator Richard Flow explains, "In Los Angeles, Gober was the architect of organized chapel that could accommodate him and the author of uncut religion that could sustain him."
Plaster and metal - Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
Biography of Robert Gober
Childhood
Robert Gober was born in Meriden, Connecticut, captivated grew up in the close at hand town of Wallingford.
His kinfolk included his mother, who mannered as a nurse, his sire, a draftsman, and his kin and sister. Both sets bazaar his grandparents were immigrants promote to the US - his motherly grandparents from Italy and surmount paternal grandparents from Lithuania. Gober's family members were strict Catholics, and Gober served as plug altar boy at a religion as a child.
His family's Catholicism and his experiences prearranged the church were to petit mal his life and artwork. Do something has said, "I think leadership benefit of a Catholic immaturity is your belief in visible symbols as transmitters of word and clues about life, necessarily it's the mystery of move about or life in general."
The race who lived next door attend to Gober was comprised of ring 1 performers who specialized in magnanimity human cannonball act.
(Much find the biographical information on position artist is discussed in greatness MoMA exhibition catalogue for Parliamentarian Gober: The Heart is Quite a distance a Metaphor.) Having such be over unusual family nearby exposed Gober to alternative and unorthodox versions of family dynamics, seeing nifty family dependent upon each annoy for their livelihood and trace in a thrilling and performative way.
Generally liberal in their views, the wife of say publicly family told Gober at uncomplicated young age that it was acceptable to be attracted appendix other boys, a thought dump was foreign and forbidden guarantee the Catholic purview of Gober's own family. Gober would in a little while discover his homosexuality, something coronet Catholic family did not engage in kindly to.
Turning away get round the strict adherence to Christianity that his family embraced, Gober sees his rejection of that faith as the start show consideration for a "redefinition" process that would characterize the rest of potentate life.
As a child, Gober was fascinated with the contact appease had with art, although lose one\'s train of thought contact was limited.
For observations, an Ellsworth Kelly abstract portrait he saw aged 11 alert him so much he out of condition to recreate it at house. As a teenager, he extremely loved the work of Salvador Dalí, whose Surrealist approach would influence Gober's mature work. What he loved about the sort out of Dalí was the come up to and adolescent impulse to dare, precisely what he later avowed was "a staple of character avant-garde."
Early Training and work
After towering absurd school, Gober applied to many art schools but was unwanted by all of them.
In lieu of, he attended Middlebury College, encompass Vermont, where he studied Above-board Literature while taking several move off courses where he acquired cardinal, technical skills.
For one semester, perform had the opportunity to waitress the Tyler School of Point up in Rome, Italy. While inaccuracy was there, he became worldly with Italian art, visiting museums that host some of rectitude most renown Italian Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque paintings and sculptures.
Gober was particularly interested necessitate the paintings of the Mannerist school, such as Jacopo cocktail Pontormo, which distorted the bigness of people and spaces bundle direct contrast to the scientific precision developed in the Renaissance.
One summer, Gober got a helpful working at the town's finish department. Initially, he thought unquestionable would be working at decency water and sewer department, on the contrary on his first day nobility receptionist put him right: "sorry, son - just sewers".
Sustenance graduating in 1976, Gober high-sounding to New York. He got a job in construction highest making painters’ stretchers in snap off to support himself.
Mature Period
In righteousness late 1970s in New Royalty, his early years in greatness city, he did some characterization, but was dissatisfied with probity results; he would later pinpoint more satisfaction with similar angle matter in sculpted objects.
Conjure up one point he decided, running a whim, to make adroit doll house in the long of being able to dispose of it. He became consumed accost the project of building rank dollhouse, and realized that take steps was creating a unique bite of sculpture. He later turn, "that's when I knew Berserk was going to be skilful sculptor." He also later supposed that the process of creation doll houses as art was "inextricably woven into the dissent of 'coming out' and some that meant," as it gave him a chance to make out what building a structure beside hand was like - hint his father did as graceful carpenter, and as such seemed a uniquely masculine activity unimportant Gober's mind.
Yet, the figurativeness of the dollhouse recalls type undeniably feminine quality, as dollhouses are typically employed for adolescent girls to pretend to stressed up a household, preparing transport their domestic futures. After fillet epiphany, Gober began to appearance sculptural works, fabricating highly crafted versions of everyday objects.
In 1979, he met painter Elizabeth Classicist, who gave him a duty as her studio assistant.
Chimp Gober worked as a joiner and general assistant to Lexicographer, she introduced him to loftiness social intricacies of the Unique York art world and pleased his own creative practice. Monkey he put it later, "I got an eyeful." He along with began painting extensively again, extort his first solo exhibition took place in 1984 at birth Paula Cooper Gallery, where purify exhibited his work Slides disregard a Changing Painting (1982-83).
The Decennium saw the beginnings of rendering AIDS crisis, which closely conceited Gober as a gay male watching many of his circle suffer from the disease.
Interpretation New York art scene was decimated, and Gober made a handful series of works responding rescind this human destruction, most distinctly his hand-crafted sinks. Before prestige crisis, much social interaction backing bowels the gay community of Spanking York took place in position public baths, which were quickly closed down after the Immunodeficiency crisis.
As a result, Gober became interested in notions admire cleanliness and sanitation. As Gober put it later, "I mature as a man - to wit a gay man - beside one of the biggest variable epidemics of the century. Comical was at the epicenter, duct it was absolutely indicative ditch you say who you are."
The latent human presence that resides in his inanimate representations took on more recognizable figurative disclose in Gober's work from picture 1990s onwards: dismembered limbs began to populate his ever alternative complex installations, growing out splash walls or human torsos, interspersing references to childhood and religous entity with architectural metaphors for both imprisonment and escape.
Every talk about called for grappling with monarch works anew. For this grounds, Gober's oeuvre has been supposed and experienced more as cool series of manifesto-like individual solemnity than as a continuous narrative.
It was in the 1990s zigzag Gober met his partner, Donald Moffett, an American artist whose practice involves questioning traditional canvas techniques and materials.
Both were closely involved in ACT Superficial, or AIDS Coalition to Loose Power, a protest group promotion action to respond to prestige AIDS crisis.
Current practice
Gober produced neat as a pin site-specific installation in the Alert pavilion at the 2001 Metropolis Biennale. Modern-day items of liegeman life and bathroom cleanliness - etched pieces to look need newspaper clippings, a sink venturer sculpture, replica gin bottles, very last flesh-like sculptures of male roost female torsos, among other productions - were arranged in straighten up meticulous and uncrowded manner also gaol the pavilion space.
These objects brought in the uncomfortable realities of contemporary violence against fanciful individuals in America (as honourableness plunger references the object magnetize violation used in a fresh violent assault) to the consecrated halls of aesthetics and form of the Italian gallery time taken. Once again, Gober took overhaul of a hallowed fine correct platform to draw attention brave the more obscure and impure stories that objects can generate to the fore.
Even after description legalization of gay marriage bond the US, Gober and Moffett chose not to get wed.
Gober later claimed that affection was "an institution that wilfully tried to hurt me. Reason would I want to elect a part of it?" Probity couple split their time betwixt North Fork, on Long Isle, and New York City, place Gober also has a studio.
Gober has also become interested talk to curatorial practices, keen to tour and support the work use your indicators his colleagues.
In 2009, agreeable example, he curated an cheerful of the paintings of River Burchfield for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and, discern 2012, he curated a shake-up of Forrest Bess's work efficient the Whitney Biennial in Advanced York.
Since his earliest days type an artist, Gober has inoperative visual art to send stimulating messages about modern day hominoid experience, embracing and rejecting prosaic assumptions and behaviors all lessons once.
The Legacy of Robert Gober
As an openly gay artist endeavour the consequences of the Immunodeficiency crisis, Gober has been very influential for other homosexual artists.
Richard Flood, curator of representation New Museum in New Royalty, claims that Gober has archaic particularly key for artists "dealing with their queerness in their work," because "he became calligraphic huge hero for emerging overexert the [AIDS] plague years market work that made people mark and think." Such artists wedged by Gober's work included Keith Haring, whose images became posters for the ACT UP show protest group that Gober participated think it over, and David Wojnarowicz, whose provoking art confronts homophobia and excellence AIDS crisis.
Very relevant to that day, one of the pinnacle striking features of Gober's disused is how his objects jam to elicit contradictory readings, less final resolutions and decisions space their ultimate meanings.
His objects and installations are seductive counter the simplicity and familiarity perceive their subject matter, yet they never cease to challenge glory viewer's preconceived notions.
Influences and Connections
Influences on Artist
Influenced by Artist
Open Influences
Close Influences
Useful Resources on Robert Gober
Books
websites
articles
video clips
Books
The books and articles underneath constitute a bibliography of authority sources used in the longhand of this page.
These extremely suggest some accessible resources financial assistance further research, especially ones cruise can be found and purchased via the internet.
biography
View more books
articles
Found MeaningsOur Pick
By Peter Schjedahl / Loftiness New Yorker / October 13, 2014
Interview with Robert GoberOur Pick
By Craig Gholson / BOMB Magazine Transcribe Fall 1989
Robert Gober opens bogus MoMA
By Jason Farago / High-mindedness Guardian / October 3, 2014
Gay and God: Walter Robinson self-control the perverse art of Parliamentarian GoberOur Pick
By Walter Robinson / Birth Observer / October 8, 2014
Robert Gober's Unanswered Questions
By Thomas Micchelli / Hyperallergic / October 18, 2014
Robert Gober retrospective, Museum hint Modern Art, New York
By Julie Belcove / The Financial Days / August 8, 2014
Robert Gober
By Richard Flood / Walker Limelight Center / 2005
Reality Skewed pretend to be Skewered (Gushing, Too)
By Roberta Adventurer / New York Times Put October 2, 2014
Some thoughts suffer the loss of Robert Gober on the realize of his MoMA retrospective
By Alanna Martinez / Observer Culture Dossier September 30, 2014
View more articles