Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor - (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Published in conjunction with the first large-scale survey exhibition of Robert Gober's art in the United States and prepared in close collaboration with him, Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor traces the development of his work, highlighting themes and motifs to which he has returned throughout the decades. The book features an essay by Hilton Als--a text both wide-ranging and personal--and an in-depth narrative of Gober's life. The rich selection of images illustrates every phase of the artist's career, and includes previously unpublished photographs from his own archive." -- Publisher's description.

Book Synopsis

Robert Gober rose to prominence in the mid-1980s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Early in his career, he made deceptively simple sculptures of everyday objects--beginning with sinks and moving on to domestic furniture such as playpens, beds and doors. In the 1990s, his practice evolved from single works to theatrical room-sized environments. In all of his work, Gober's formal intelligence is never separate from a penetrating reading of the socio-political context of his time. His objects and installations are among the most psychologically charged artworks of the late twentieth century, reflecting the artist's sustained concerns with issues of social justice, freedom and tolerance. Published in conjunction with the first large-scale survey of the artist's career to take place in the United States, this publication presents his works in all media, including individual sculptures and immersive sculptural environments, as well as a distinctive selection of drawings, prints and photographs. Prepared in close collaboration with the artist, it traces the development of a remarkable body of work, highlighting themes and motifs that emerged in the early 1980s and continue to inform Gober's work today. An essay by Hilton Als is complemented by an in-depth chronology featuring a rich selection of images from the artist's archives, including never-before-published photographs of works in progress.

Robert Gober was born in 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions, most notably at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Schaulager, Basel. In 2001, he represented the United States at the 49th Venice Biennale. Gober's curatorial projects have been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Menil Collection, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

Review Quotes

In the mid-1980's Robert Gober began to receive significant art-world attention for his sculptres of everyday domestic objects embedded with references to social justice, freedom adn tolerance. The oblique works offers a socio-political and psyhcological end-of-the-twentieth-century context to their mundane formal structures.--The Editors "THE Magazine"

The heart is an excitable physical organ that registers sensations of fight or flight and of love or aversion: the first and last unimpeachable witness to what can't help but matter, for good and for ill, in every life.--Peter Schjeldahl "The New Yorker"

What claims our attention is not so much Gober's quotidian subjects as the intentness with which he reconstitutes ordinary objects; this is his way of possessing them. Gober's laconic perfectionism lends humdrum stuff an eeriness. I feel that eeriness in teh subtle shadow play he reveals in his plainly carpentered cloest, in the delicacy of human hairs inserted into the wax surface of a sculpted leg, and in the trompe l'oeil finesse with which he paints the label on the battered Benjamin Moore can. Gober keeps his virtuosity tamped down adn under wraps. His weird world is constructed with teh meticulousness of a jeweler putting together a Faberge egg.--Jed Perl "The New York Review of Books"

27th Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalists for LGBT Nonfiction.--The Editors "Lambda Literary"

About the Author

Ann Temkin is an American art curator, and currently the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic who writes for The New Yorker.

Claudia Carson is archivist and registrar to Robert Gober.

Paulina Pabocha is Assistant Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art.

Christian Scheidemann is the Senior Conservator and President of Contemporary Conservation Ltd.