{"data":{"id":"3523","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":3523,"topgoose_id":2033,"tms_id":3523,"display_name":"Robert Gober","sort_name":"Gober Robert","display_date":"1954–","begin_date":"1954","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/40521\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAscending Sink\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e and\u003cem\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/9246\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eUntitled\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003eare part of a large corpus Robert Gober has made over three decades, including beds, chairs, cribs, newspapers, advertisements, and fruit. Gober’s practice can be traced back to the embrace of common items in Cubist collages or Duchampian readymades. His objects differ, however, in that they are fabricated by hand, with artisanal exactitude. Chosen out of the flux of his daily life and his unconscious, the resulting sculptures— quite disparate and often brought together in installations of seemingly unrelated forms— are symbolic, poetic, funny, and political, often at the same time.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLike his contemporaries \u003ca href=\"/artists/3310\"\u003eJeff Koons\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"/artists/12888\"\u003eHaim Steinbach\u003c/a\u003e, Gober became a leading force in the transformation of sculpture in the 1980s. These artists were invested in the politics of everyday experience, even as they built on Minimalist strategies such as repetition and on the projection of theatricality and humor onto quotidian forms by such forebears as \u003ca href=\"/artists/964\"\u003eClaes Oldenburg\u003c/a\u003e. It was in the early 1980s that Gober began, as he wrote, “to stretch and distort the simple form of the sink,” producing a variety of formal permutations—each absent of faucets or drains and each tweaked with individual meaning but sharing allusions to cleanliness and work and, more figuratively, to the body’s anatomy. Gober also dealt playfully with their installation, as in the ascension invoked in this example, which recalls a \u003ca href=\"/artists/662\"\u003eDonald Judd\u003c/a\u003e “stack” sculpture as well as a religious tableau.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGober’s sculptures always escape literal interpretation. Typical is \u003cem\u003eUntitled\u003c/em\u003e,\na giant stick of beeswax made to resemble\nbutter and placed on a mat of luminous\nglassine, a handwritten facsimile of\nthe product’s familiar wrapper. The artist\nleaves us to wonder about possible\nmeanings, or simply to admire the banal\nbeauty of ordinary things.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500118768","wikidata_id":"Q1353414","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:57:54.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-12T07:03:47.891-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/3523/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/3523/exhibitions"}}}}