Lot Essay
Double Sink, 1984, is from the first group of work which would become Robert Gober's signature sculptures: The Sinks. These seminal objects were exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1985. Gober continued to work with the image through 1987 and again in a new incarnation in his one-person exhibition at the DIA Center for the Arts in 1992.
Gober began his first sculptures in 1980-81 in the form of small scale constructions which resembled doll houses. They were meticulously crafted using actual building materials, hand-painted and very private in their nature, never exhibited in public at the time. "It was through the doll houses Gober recalls that he physically and symbolically stumbled on the imagery for his first sculptures" (J. Simon, "Robert Gober and the Extra Ordinary," Robert Gober, Paris 1991, p. 80).
The sinks were wall-mounted, ordinary sinks, without faucets or plumbing. They possessed a human quality; faucet holes become eyes, or the nipples on a human torso, the round edges suggesting shoulders and the human body.
The homeliness of Gober's first sinks touched a familiar and unsettling chord. In fact, Gober's first sinks were derived from autobiographical referents. As Gary Garrells wrote: 'Gober's early sinks were portraits, locations of memories, porcelain sinks used by both of his grandmothers, identical work sinks installed by his father in a basement shop, and the broom sink from Gober's first studio, a storefront laundry in New York's East Village.' His works were not about an endgame strategy of modernist or post-modernist thought, closing down or narrowing theoretical or formal problems--in fact, they were not theoretically inspired at all--but rather opened up a field of exploration, one that could variously and intuitively draw from Minimalism's specific object countered by the hands-on approach of the craftsman; whose imagery could be ordinary but nonetheless imbued with autobiographical resonance; and whose status in the world had more in common with various trompe-l'oeil techniques used by fine artists, artisans and in industry than the "ready-made" as a thing itself (ibid, p. 81).
The sink, Gober said, was 'a very deep image to me.' In his mind, it had to do not only with the possibility of cleansing, but with illness and death. 'For me,' he wrote in 1989, 'death has temporarily overtaken life in New York City. And most of the artists I know are fumbling for ways to express this' (D. Kazanjian, "Artist At Odds", Vogue, Feb. 1993, p. 229).
Gober began his first sculptures in 1980-81 in the form of small scale constructions which resembled doll houses. They were meticulously crafted using actual building materials, hand-painted and very private in their nature, never exhibited in public at the time. "It was through the doll houses Gober recalls that he physically and symbolically stumbled on the imagery for his first sculptures" (J. Simon, "Robert Gober and the Extra Ordinary," Robert Gober, Paris 1991, p. 80).
The sinks were wall-mounted, ordinary sinks, without faucets or plumbing. They possessed a human quality; faucet holes become eyes, or the nipples on a human torso, the round edges suggesting shoulders and the human body.
The homeliness of Gober's first sinks touched a familiar and unsettling chord. In fact, Gober's first sinks were derived from autobiographical referents. As Gary Garrells wrote: 'Gober's early sinks were portraits, locations of memories, porcelain sinks used by both of his grandmothers, identical work sinks installed by his father in a basement shop, and the broom sink from Gober's first studio, a storefront laundry in New York's East Village.' His works were not about an endgame strategy of modernist or post-modernist thought, closing down or narrowing theoretical or formal problems--in fact, they were not theoretically inspired at all--but rather opened up a field of exploration, one that could variously and intuitively draw from Minimalism's specific object countered by the hands-on approach of the craftsman; whose imagery could be ordinary but nonetheless imbued with autobiographical resonance; and whose status in the world had more in common with various trompe-l'oeil techniques used by fine artists, artisans and in industry than the "ready-made" as a thing itself (ibid, p. 81).
The sink, Gober said, was 'a very deep image to me.' In his mind, it had to do not only with the possibility of cleansing, but with illness and death. 'For me,' he wrote in 1989, 'death has temporarily overtaken life in New York City. And most of the artists I know are fumbling for ways to express this' (D. Kazanjian, "Artist At Odds", Vogue, Feb. 1993, p. 229).