| Description |
Robert Gober is a storyteller. Over the course of more than two decades the artist has composed an epic work in cumulative chapters whose characters and motifs recur, evolve or even mutate, and, sometimes, marry. Gober's story lines arc out from resonant memories of home, where well-being is supposed to derive from faith and family, and peril threatens those who forsake either. In Gober's narrative universe, as in fairy tales and fables, the world inside the home is every bit as confounding and dangerous - and charged with temptation - as the world outside. In either world, inside or outside, the fulcrum of the story is found where sex, politics, and religion intersect. - Brenda Richardson This publication catalogues and explores the latest sculptural installation by Robert Gober, one of contemporary art's most highly-regarded figures. Unlike anything that has been seen before, this new work explores questions of sexuality, religion, relationships, nature, and memory, all informed by the current political climate. Loosely following the floorplan of a church, the installation brings together many of Gober's known sculptural motifs and introduces new ones as Gober continues into uncharted artistic territory.
The first of the two volumes includes a comprehensive essay by Brenda Richardson written over the course of the two years of the installation's development. Richardson spent hours in the studio in conversation with Gober, and her Lexicon provides an unprecedented glimpse at the working process and multiple layers of meaning in Gober's complex work.
The lavishly-illustrated second volume reproduces over 50 full-color photographs of the completed work. Robert Gober began exhibiting his work publicly in 1979. Since that time, he has had numerous exhibitions, both in the United States and abroad. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and his work has been the subject of one-person museum exhibitions at such institutions as the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Museum of the Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo. He lives and works in New York City. |