Background
Robert Gober was born on September 12, 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut, United States. His family included his mother, who worked as a nurse, his father, a draftsman, and his brother and sister.
14 Old Chapel Rd, Middlebury, VT 05753, United States
Middlebury College
Robert Gober was born on September 12, 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut, United States. His family included his mother, who worked as a nurse, his father, a draftsman, and his brother and sister.
Initially, during the period from 1972 to 1976, Robert studied literature and fine art at Middlebury College. He also attended Tyler School of Art in Rome.
In 1976, after studies, Gober settled down in New York, where he initially worked as a carpenter, crafting stretchers for artists and renovating lofts. During that time, he also served as an assistant to the painter Elizabeth Murray. Some time later, in the 1980's, Robert decided to broaden his scope of art and started to make sculptures. In 1984, he held his first solo exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery, where he exhibited his work "Slides of a Changing Painting".
The 1980s saw the beginnings of the AIDS crisis, which closely affected the sculptor. In order to support the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Robert, together with other artists, organized an art auction. During that time, Gober also made several series of works, responding to this human destruction, most notable of which were his hand-crafted sinks. The latent human presence, that resides in his inanimate representations, took on more recognizable figurative form in Gober's work from the 1990s onwards: dismembered limbs began to populate his ever more complex installations, growing out of walls or human torsos.
In 2001, the sculptor represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.
Later in his career, Gober became interested in curatorial practices, keen to explore and support the work of his colleagues. In 2009, for example, he curated an exhibition of the paintings of Charles Burchfield for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and, in 2012, he curated a room of Forrest Bess's work at the Whitney Biennial in New York.
From October 2014 to January 2015, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented "Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor", a 40-year retrospective of his work, including approximately 130 sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints and photographs. This exhibition was the first large-scale display in the United States. Also, Gober created a three-story permanent installation in the Haunted House at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, which opened in May 2015.
Currently, he lives and works in New York.
Quotations:
"When I was a young artist, and I would go look at other artists' career retrospectives, and I was often disappointed with the lack of story line... What was missing to me was the story of where the artist came from and how they got to where they were."
"When you grow up being taught to worship, whatever that means, there is an array of body-rich symbols: tears, blood, crucifixion, the stations of the cross, transubstantiation... Faith is a belief in something that is irrational, and so to have faith, there is some correlation there with the belief in the art."
"For the most part, works of mine are untitled. There was a brief period where I had poetic titles for works, and they're embarrassing now. I think, for the most part, it's not something that I have talent for."
"You grow up trying to interpret, worshipping, visual symbols. It's a body-soaked imagery that you're looking at."
"I think the benefit of a Catholic childhood is your belief in visual symbols as transmitters of information and clues about life, whether it's the mystery of life or life in general."
Since 2013, Gober has been serving on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Donald Moffett, an American painter, is Robert's partner.