Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor
an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, October 4, 2014–January 18, 2015
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Ann Temkin Museum of Modern Art, 271 pp., $45.00
The sixty-year-old artist Robert Gober is a connoisseur of the uncanny. He dreams up discombobulating variations on ordinary objects, sights, and situations. Then he turns his disquieting visions—a playpen crisscrossed by two pipes; a wedge of cheese with a head of hair—into impeccably carpentered, cast, painted, woven, and sewn works. The retrospective of his sculptures, drawings, prints, paintings, and installations at the Museum of Modern Art—the first large-scale survey of his work in the US—is a twenty-first-century cabinet of curiosities.
Gober, who planned the show along with Ann Temkin, a curator…