Gober, Robert

Robert Gober, (born September 12, 1954, Wallingford, Connecticut, U.S.), American sculptor and installation artist known for his eerie and evocative reconsiderations of everyday objects. His common motifs included the human body and domestic objects, with which he examined, often with humour, such notions as religion, sexuality, childhood, and change.

Gober studied at Middlebury College (1972–76), spending his junior year abroad at the Tyler School in Rome, before settling in New York City. After a brief period as a painter, he drew notice in the 1980s with a series of haunting sculptures loosely based on the forms of household items such as sinks, drains, and playpens. Nonfunctional and often altered in scale from their sources—Open Playpen (1987), for example, lacks the protective bars on one side, while X Playpen (1987) effectively reduces the “play” area to one of two tiny triangular spaces—those sculptures seemed exercises in wistful memory, exposing a stark poetry embedded within the mundane and the domestic.

Gober carried those ideas further in sculptures and installations that commingled the familiar with the strange. Untitled (1990), in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is a realistic sculpture of the lower part of a man’s leg, isolated as if it was emerging from or disappearing into a wall. Replete with shoe, sock, a bit of pants leg, and an area of hairy skin exposed, the sculpture suggests at once both masculine presence and its disempowerment. At first glance Gober’s Untitled (1997), in the Milwaukee Art Museum, seems to be simply an open suitcase on the floor. Upon further examination, however, the bottom of the suitcase opens to a small installation beneath the museum floor featuring seaweed, coins, running water, and a sculpture of the legs of both an adult and a child. Such installations eluded simple interpretation, but their air of mystery and sense of vulnerability exposed was central to Gober’s concerns and made his enigmatic objects popular attractions throughout the art world.

In 1999 Gober was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture by the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He participated in the 2001 Venice Biennale and was the subject of a retrospective in 2007 at the Schaulager Museum in Basel, Switzerland. In 2014 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a major survey of his work (“Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor”), the first of its kind in the United States. Gober’s works reside in the collections of not only the Hirshhorn and the Milwaukee Art Museum, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London.