On October 6, an exhibition of the works of the still-living American sculptor Robert Gober opened in New York's Museum of Contemporary Art, MoMa. The retrospective entitled "The Heart is not a Metaphor" is full of legs, sinks, doors and other motifs that are a constant in his oeuvre and that, due to being taken out of context, make him one of the most intricate artists of our time.
Robert Gober is one of the most important American sculptors of our time, who was born in 1954. Today, the sixty-year-old artist attended the opening of the exhibition on October 6 at New York's MoMa Museum of Modern Art, which is with retrospect "The Heart is not a Metaphor" marked the last forty years of his creation.
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Frequent motifs in his artistic oeuvre are doors, beds, sinks and legs. They are domestic and familiar objects, one would say, but what Gober does with them is to takes out of context. The leg that "protrudes" from the wall of the museum therefore has an out-of-context impression on the visitors shocking effect (no wonder: body parts appear on their own more rarely in life - unless you live with the Addams family and their famous "Thing" palm). It's the same with the sink, which we immediately reminiscent of Duchamp's famous urinal. The artist thus prepares us to do so we look at otherwise everyday objects from new, different and unexpected angles – somewhat similar to what the works of Rene Magritte force us to do.
It's on display until January 18, 2015, about 130 of Gober's works are on display, and the artist chose a fragment from the novel "Sleepless Nights" by writer Elizabeth Hardwick as the title of the exhibition. Like his works, ''The Heart is not a Metaphor'' is a sentence taken out of context, but at the same time it shows the artist's interweaving: if his works are metaphors for something else, his heart certainly isn't.
Take a look at some of the works of the unusual artist Robert Gober in our photo gallery.
More information:
www.moma.org
