Robert Gober

Robert Gober
Untitled, 1992, mixed media, Collection of the Artist
Born	(1954-09-12) September 12, 1954 (age 62) Wallingford, Connecticut
Nationality	American
Education	Middlebury College, Vermont, Tyler School of Art in Rome
Known for	Sculpture

Robert Gober (born September 12, 1954) is an American sculptor. His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs.

Gober was born in Wallingford, Connecticut and studied literature and then fine art at Middlebury College,Vermont and the Tyler School of Art in Rome. Gober settled in New York in 1976 and initially earned his living as a carpenter, crafting stretchers for artists and renovating lofts. He also worked as an assistant to the painter Elizabeth Murray for five years.

Gober's work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs, and has themes of nature, sexuality, religion, and politics. The sculptures are meticulously handcrafted, even when they appear to just be a re-creation of a common sink. While he is best known for his sculptures, he has also made photographs, prints, and drawings and has curated exhibitions.

In 1982-83, Gober created Slides of a Changing Painting, consisting of 89 images of paintings made on a small piece of plywood in his storefront studio in the East Village; he made a slide of each motif, then scraped off the paint and began again. One of his most well known series of more than 50 increasingly eccentric sinks – made of plaster, wood, wire lath, and coated in layers of semi-gloss enamel – which he produced in the mid-1980s.

By 1989, Gober was casting beeswax into sculptures of men’s legs, complete not only with shoes and trouser legs but also human hair inserted into the beeswax.

In the Whitney Biennial 2012, he curated a room of Forrest Bess's paintings and archival materials dealing with the artist's exploration into hermaphrodism. He also curated “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2009 (which traveled to the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2010).