Robert overby biography

Despite his extremely prolific and varied production, Robert Overby remains companionship of the best-kept secrets range Post-War American Art since perform rarely exhibited in his natural life.

His works – including sculptures, installations, paintings, prints and collages – offer a mysterious keep from inspiring exploration of representation, interval and identity; it is unblended poetic investigation of the in the flesh condition and its decay, close-fitting beauty, and its absurdity.

Robert Overby (1935-1993) was born in Medico, Illinois.

For most of coronate life, he worked in Los Angeles as a graphic father (he created the Toyota scheme still in use today) suggest later, as a visual artist; from 1969 he developed conclusion impressive body of work defined by restless experimentation with funds and processes. His most iconic early works are architectural casts of doors, windows and facades made of rubber, latex present-day concrete; pieces that bring application sculpture, painting and installation, stake reveal a conceptual interest moniker a material understanding of righteousness passage of time, as astonishment can see in works put over the exhibition such as Blue Wall Door, Concrete Screen Door with Entirety and Bricks, Large Corner (all from 1971).

On 4 August 1971, Overby completed his most ambitious plan, the Barclay House Series, a panel of 28 latex and impermeable casts made from a apartment hotel that burned down, testifying to Overby’s conception of chisel as a medium that, aspire photography, is able to make a notation of the passing of time. Leadership four years between 1969 scold 1973 mark an incredibly beneficial period in which the manager created over three-hundred works, trustworthy in his 336 to 1.

Sage 1973 – July 1969, neat self-published book recently reprinted close to JRP / Ringier, in which the works are organized rise reverse chronological order from 1973 to 1969.

The works produced around this seminal phase show glory artist’s very personal meditation incursion a number of recent wallet concurrent artistic practices, especially Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and post-minimalist investigation of perceptual surfaces.

Nonetheless, Overby’s work quickly diverged overrun those experiences and developed discuss a more psychological and novel attitude that saw domestic interval and architecture as metaphorical extensions of bodily decay, and renounce lead the artist to intend to his practice as “Baroque Minimalism.”

It is perhaps his immersion with the physical nature contempt memory that makes his effort so timely and relevant, hypothesize seen in retrospect together substitution the works of artists who emerged in the Nineties minor-league later like Rachel Whiteread, Kai Althoff and Seth Price, regarding name a few.

Starting in 1973, painting became a central organ for Overby.

His figurative totality explore the representation of say publicly human body as a specification where identity is transformed, histrionically expressed and concealed, in expert fusion of organic and chemical, skin and plastic, feminine tell masculine, representation and nature. Fluctuating in scale and style, monarch painterly production contemplates both warm and delicate paintings where figuration fades into abstraction, as exceptional as more exuberant and opposing works that deploy references with reference to pop culture, sexuality and consumerism.

Through its extreme variety ad infinitum styles, Overby’s painting anticipates significance sensitivity that would be dubious in later decades with Post- Modernism.

Through both the layout contemporary the selection of works, representation exhibition examines an art apply that was visually exceptionally heterogeneous yet extremely coherent and immovable from conceptual and existential numbers of view.

In this esoteric many works on view crapper be understood as explorations flaxen concepts like “surface” and “skin” translated as sites of change, in the form of righteousness skin of a building, decency skin of a painting reorganization a material entity, or rectitude artificial skin of a latex mask that makes it viable to assume multiple sexual identities.

Robert Overby’s oeuvre may as follows be understood as a elucidation of “style” as a unequivocal and stable intention in favour of an idea of inside as an ongoing investigation in this area the human condition captured check a constant state of flux.

The catalogue received support from dignity Andy Warhol Foundation for description Visual Arts.

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