Robert Gober

Slides of a Changing Painting is an artist book by Robert Gober that takes as its point of departure the artist’s highly influential, yet rarely seen, early work of the same name—a slide presentation documenting a year-long evolution of a single painting. Presented at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1984 with three projectors and eighty-nine slides, the work showcased themes and subjects that would become central to Gober’s oeuvre and in hindsight, has come to be seen as a career-spanning show more lexicon for the artist’s practice. This artist book has been designed to replicate the experience of the original installation, with eighty-nine images dissolving into each other over the course of 368 pages, creating what Gober has referred to as the “memoir of a painting.” This is the first time that Slides of a Changing Painting has been showcased in its entirety in book form.

From 1982–83, Gober worked on Slides of a Changing Painting in his East 7th Street storefront, documenting the process as he repeatedly painted on a single Masonite board, reworking imagery or else starting over entirely. Motifs that would become important to his later sculptures and installations make their first appearances here, such as drains, pipes, flowing water, forests, lost garments, sinks, windows, and bare chests pierced with trees and waterfalls. His treatment of the human body here lays the groundwork for some of his most uncanny and surrealistic works. Made against the backdrop of cultural conservatism and an unchecked health epidemic that was rampant in the 1980s, Slides of a Changing Painting contains a bewildering mixture of dread and hope, with Gober’s queer identity and artistic sensibilities coming into remarkable focus—demonstrating a sense of vision that few artists have so early in their careers.

https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/5/294

Robert Gober is an artist and sometime curator whose work has been exhibited since the early 1980s most notably in one person exhibitions at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Schaulager, Basel, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Glenstone, Potomac and the Serpentine, London. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2001. His curatorial projects have been shown at The Menil Collection, Houston, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York and Maine. show less

This intimate catalogue presents Gober in the act of creation. New work is featured here as well as his famous sink pieces and his figurative work.

Selected as the United States representative to the 2001 Venice Biennale, the sculptor and installation artist Robert Gober has, thanks to several major museum exhibitions in recent years, established himself as perhaps the most important artist of his generation, thanks to his symbolically charged re-creations of everyday objects that he makes into installations that question the ideals and values of childhood, family, home, and religion. This catalogue presents his work for the United show more States pavilion at the Biennale. show less

Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held at Museum Boymans-van Beuningen Rotterdam, Germany, May 13 - July 1, 1990. Traveled to Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, September 1 - October 14, 1990. Texts by Robert Gober, Ulrich Loock, Karel Schampers, and Trevor Fairbrother. Fully documents Gober's work with illustrations and well considered texts. Edited by Gober, Loock, and Schampers. Catalogue includes "Inventory List," which lists the works compiled by Robert Gober since 1980 show more [until 1990] in chronological order, biography, exhibition history, and bibliography. Text in English and German. show less