Robert Gober - Hardcover

Schimmel, Paul; Foster, Hal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0914357514 ISBN 13: 9780914357513

Publisher: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997

Synopsis

Selected as the United States representative to the 2001 Venice Biennale, the sculptor and installation artist Robert Gober has, thanks to several major museum exhibitions in recent years, established himself as perhaps the most important artist of his generation, thanks to his symbolically charged re-creations of everyday objects that he makes into installations that question the ideals and values of childhood, family, home, and religion. This catalogue presents his work for the United States pavilion at the Biennale.

About this title

About the Author:

Dave Hickey has written for most major American cultural publications. Formerly executive editor at Art in America, Hickey's publications include Prior Convictions (1989), The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993), and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). Hickey received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism in 1994. He is currently associate professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Robert Gober was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, in 1954 and moved to New York in 1976. In 1983 he abandoned painting and turned his attention to sculpture. Since 1979 he has had numerous exhibitions, both in the United States and abroad. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and his work has been the subject of one-person museum exhibitions at such institutions as the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Review:

27th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists for LGBT Nonfiction. (The Editors Lambda Literary)

What claims our attention is not so much Gober's quotidian subjects as the intentness with which he reconstitutes ordinary objects; this is his way of possessing them. Gober's laconic perfectionism lends humdrum stuff an eeriness. I feel that eeriness in teh subtle shadow play he reveals in his plainly carpentered cloest, in the delicacy of human hairs inserted into the wax surface of a sculpted leg, and in the trompe l'oeil finesse with which he paints the label on the battered Benjamin Moore can. Gober keeps his virtuosity tamped down adn under wraps. His weird world is constructed with teh meticulousness of a jeweler putting together a Faberge egg. (Jed Perl The New York Review of Books)

In the mid-1980's Robert Gober began to receive significant art-world attention for his sculptres of everyday domestic objects embedded with references to social justice, freedom adn tolerance. The oblique works offers a socio-political and psyhcological end-of-the-twentieth-century context to their mundane formal structures. (The Editors THE Magazine)

The heart is an excitable physical organ that registers sensations of fight or flight and of love or aversion: the first and last unimpeachable witness to what can't help but matter, for good and for ill, in every life. (Peter Schjeldahl The New Yorker)

About this edition

• Publisher: Museum of Contemporary Art
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0914357514
• ISBN 13: 9780914357513
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104