Harley Gaber
| Harley Gaber | |
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| Background information | |
| Born |
June 5, 1943 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | June 16, 2011 (aged 68) Gallup, New Mexico, U.S. |
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| Years active | 1963–2011 |
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| Website | harleygaber |
Harley Gaber (June 5, 1943 – June 16, 2011) was a visual artist and composer known for his minimalist and spectral approaches to time and sound. With his emphasis on quiet sustained sonorities and textures, Gaber is counted among the early American minimalist composers, and considered to be a forerunner of drone and spectralism. His best known recorded composition, The Winds Rise in the North, has been called by musician Keith Fullerton Whitman "one of the holy grails of minimalism in music in the 20th century."
In 1978, he stopped composing, moved from New York City to San Diego, California, and began creating photo-collages, mixed media collages, paintings, and pen-and-ink works he called graphic music. However, in 1993 he started work on Die Plage (The Plague), an historical narrative of Germany from the Weimar Republic to the end of World War II, completing it in 2002. It grew to become a massive work of approximately 5,000 photomontaged canvases measuring 16 by 20 inches (41 by 51 cm).
In the final three years of his life Gaber composed two works: I Saw My Mother Ascending Mt Fuji and In Memoriam 2010. The album of his last work was released two weeks before Gaber committed suicide in June 2011.
German Expressionism and Dada are the artistic movements that most influenced him. The particular artists that critics cite as evident in Gaber's work are Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The photomontage works of John Heartfield and Hannah Höch influenced him greatly, as did their use of photographs to subvert and criticize their subject matter.
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