Robert Gober

Robert Gober is a uniquely American artist. His images evolve from our everyday domestic lives and are transformed into haunting objects that live in the twilight separating the actual from the dreamed. In his sculptures, the ordinary becomes slightly strange, and a subtle dose of unease is injected into the mundane.

Born in Wallingford, Connecticut, in 1954, the artist attended Middlebury College in Vermont before moving to Manhattan in 1976. While his original ambition was to be a painter, he abandoned this goal in 1983 and turned his attention to sculpture. He first came to prominence as an artist in the mid-1980s, with a body of work that explored countless variations on the form of a simple domestic sink. Since then his work has rarely strayed from the portrayal of easily recognizable subjects, such as drains, doors, children's furniture, and the human body. However, Gober's sculpture is never precisely what it appears to be, and he uses its apparent simplicity to explore such complex themes as childhood, home, sexuality, victimization, religion, and transcendence.

Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing examines the artist's vocabulary of forms, and the recurrence of certain images throughout his entire body of work. While this exhibition provides a visible link between his use of sculpture and drawing, it also brings into focus his unique personal archive of subject matter and the tenacity with which he expands upon it. By repeatedly reworking his source imagery, Gober transposes his iconic forms from the realm of the recognizable into that of the profoundly enigmatic.