Artist Biennial

Robert Gober

1954–

52 works in the collection 24 exhibitions at the Whitney

Biography

The Ascending Sink and Untitled are part of a large corpus Robert Gober has made over three decades, including beds, chairs, cribs, newspapers, advertisements, and fruit. Gober’s practice can be traced back to the embrace of common items in Cubist collages or Duchampian readymades. His objects differ, however, in that they are fabricated by hand, with artisanal exactitude. Chosen out of the flux of his daily life and his unconscious, the resulting sculptures— quite disparate and often brought together in installations of seemingly unrelated forms— are symbolic, poetic, funny, and political, often at the same time.

Like his contemporaries Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, Gober became a leading force in the transformation of sculpture in the 1980s. These artists were invested in the politics of everyday experience, even as they built on Minimalist strategies such as repetition and on the projection of theatricality and humor onto quotidian forms by such forebears as Claes Oldenburg. It was in the early 1980s that Gober began, as he wrote, “to stretch and distort the simple form of the sink,” producing a variety of formal permutations—each absent of faucets or drains and each tweaked with individual meaning but sharing allusions to cleanliness and work and, more figuratively, to the body’s anatomy. Gober also dealt playfully with their installation, as in the ascension invoked in this example, which recalls a Donald Judd “stack” sculpture as well as a religious tableau.

Gober’s sculptures always escape literal interpretation. Typical is Untitled, a giant stick of beeswax made to resemble butter and placed on a mat of luminous glassine, a handwritten facsimile of the product’s familiar wrapper. The artist leaves us to wonder about possible meanings, or simply to admire the banal beauty of ordinary things.