9/6/2000
Robert Gober
SFMoMA, San Francisco
Sculpture + Drawing
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.
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