Robert Gober at the Modern
The Museum of Modern Art will present a survey of Robert Gober’s career, spanning four decades, beginning on Saturday.
The artist, who has had a house in Peconic since 1990, is known for his enigmatic sculptures of everyday objects with a twist, large installations, and drawings and prints. The work is often minimal but charged with narrative and allusions to religion, politics, and sexuality.
“Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor” was organized with the artist by Ann Temkin and Paulina Pobocha and will have representations of all of these mediums and themes starting with mid-1970s paintings, including one of the Connecticut house he grew up in, which hangs at the entrance to the galleries.
The exhibition goes on to explore the artist’s sculptures of non-functioning sinks, which preoccupied him throughout the 1980s and during the AIDS epidemic, including “Two Partially Buried Sinks,” mounted on the museum’s exterior wall and visible through a gallery window.
His room-size installations, which began in 1989, are also represented in the show. Complete with their own artist-designed wallpaper, they act as site-specific settings for the sculptures contained within, be they bridal gowns or fabricated bags of cat litter. Here one finds the drains missing from the sinks of the prior decade, except they’re set into the walls.
The truncated legs that the artist started in 1989 also form a significant part of the show. Whether plainly clad in trousers and emerging from the wall from the shin down or complicated with candles, drains, or other appurtenances, these are surreal and highly craft-based works, which are, as in all of his works, made by hand by the artist or his collaborators.
Other less known series and rooms of work by other artists whose shows has curated over the years, are also presented in the show. A 1992 exhibition he placed in the Dia Center in New York City has been recreated with all three rooms constructed within the museum, including an antechamber, central gallery, and a dark cul-de-sac. The installation features a paint-by-number-style mural inspired by the North Fork, but is interrupted by barred windows revealing a blue sky. The objects include plaster-cast boxes of rat poison and stacks of newspapers with real and fictive content. His sinks also return in this piece, now with running water.
Even more is on view, including further installations, sculpture, and his drawings and prints. The exhibition will be up through Jan. 18.