Drawing plays a vital role in Robert Gober's art. Predominantly sculpture and installation, Gober's work is the product of a prolonged meditation on the formal qualities of ordinary, everyday objects and forms. Concentrating on the formal presence of a chosen object to the point where they seem to become removed from their normal contexts and surroundings and become eerie or strange, Gober uses drawings to help him focus on the metaphysical properties of a chosen object. As the following grouping of Gober's drawings illustrates, Gober's drawings are working plans which help the artist to refine not merely the formal elements of an idea but also assist in researching into its validity as a sculptural presence. It is only after working on many drawings over a long period of time that he finally builds his sculptures. Between 1984 and 1986 Gober was obsessed by the domestic sink, developing a variety of sculptural variations and permutations of this disarmingly simple form. In the world of the artist, the sink became a bizarre object of permanence and expectation, its bleak and empty form becoming an icon of existential mystery. Isolated and alone on the gallery wall, Gober's sinks exude a surreal silence every bit as powerful and disturbing as the ominous and terrifying radiator in David Lynch's film Eraserhead. The isolation of the object is crucial to this effect and is probably the reason why in most of Gober's drawings, the object is often also isolated on the page. This grouping includes three drawings of sinks, one of the underside of a double-sink from 1984 (which is a drawing for an unrealized outdoor sculpture) forming part of the preparation for a series of shallow kitchen-sink sculptures, one dating from 1985 that is clearly a permutational study of the bizarre sink forms that were realised in such sculptures as The Flying Sink, and Three Parts of an X of the same year and a more practical working drawing made in preparation for Gober's ground-breaking installation at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York in 1992. In addition the grouping also includes a study for another of Gober's most celebrated objects - the playpen. In this work the artist is clearly contemplating the spatial impact of the playpen when situated at the centre of the traditional white-cube of the gallery space.

Robert Gober (b. 1954)

Untitled

細節

Robert Gober (b. 1954)
Untitled
signed, numbered and dated 'R. Gober Artist's Proof 1994-5' (on the reverse)
platinum palladium print
sheet size: 11½ x 9½ in. (29.2 x 24 cm.)
framed size: 15 x 12¾ in. (38.1 x 32.4 cm.)
Executed in 1994-1995. This work is an artist's proof from an edition of one with one artist's proof.

來源

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica
Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

出版

T. Vischer, Robert Gober, Basel 1995, p. 9 (illustrated).
"Goings On About Town: Galleries- Chelsea: Robert Gober", The New Yorker, April 7, 1997, p. 19.

展覽

New York, Paula Cooper Gallery, November 1996-January 1997.

拍場告示

The image for lot 307 is labeled as lot 306 on page 12.