Robert Gober

Robert Gober is an American sculptor. His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs.

Gober's work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs, and has themes of nature, sexuality, religion, and politics. The sculptures are meticulously handcrafted, even when they appear to just be a re-creation of a common sink. While he is best known for his sculptures, he has also made photographs, prints, drawings and has curated exhibitions.

In 1982-83, Gober created Slides of a Changing Painting, consisting of 89 images of paintings made on a small piece of plywood in his storefront studio in the East Village; he made a slide of each motif, then scraped off the paint and began again. One of his most well known series of more than 50 increasingly eccentric sinks - made of plaster, wood, wire lath, and coated in layers of semi-gloss enamel - he produced in the mid-1980s.

By 1989, Gober was casting beeswax into sculptures of men's legs, completed not only with shoes and trouser legs but also human hair that was inserted into the beeswax.

In the Whitney Biennial 2012, Gober curated a room of Forrest Bess's paintings and archival materials dealing with the artist's exploration into hermaphrodism. He also curated "Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield" at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2009 (which traveled to the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2010).

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023