Contemporary Artist Essay

Contemporary Artist Essay

Robert Gober

Robert Gober is an American sculptor, who was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, September 12, 1954. He studied at Middlebury College, Vermont and the Tyler School of Art in Rome. He lives and works in New York City and is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery. He is best known for his sculptures, but also has made photographs, prints, and drawings and has curated exhibitions, most recently “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2009 (which will travel to the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2010). He has had exhibitions of his work in Europe, North America and Japan. One of his most well known series of works was of sculptures of sinks. He has made many sculptures of everyday objects, showing familiar things as well as strange ones(Gober et.al 1999).

His 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.

His work is in many museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Menil Collection, the Tate Modern and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He represented the United States at the 2001 Venice Biennale and has had several one-person museum exhibitions including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and Dia Art Foundation, New York. His work has also been included in five Whitney Biennials. In 2007 there was a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Schaulager in Basel. ...