Despite a prolific and diverse practice, Robert Overby remains one of the best-kept secrets in post-war American art. While rarely exhibiting during his lifetime, he nonetheless built up an extraordinary, multifaceted body of work encompassing sculpture, installation, painting, photography, print and collage.
This monograph is published on the occasion of “Robert Overby: Works 1969-1987”, the first survey exhibition of the artist's work to be organized in Europe.
Edited by Alessandro Rabottini—in collaboration with Andrea Bellini and Martin Clark—it has been conceived, from the outset, as a joint project of four partner institutions: Centre d'Art Contemporain, Genève; GAMeC – Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo; Bergen Kunsthall, and Le Consortium, Dijon.
Beginning in 1969, Robert Overby (1935-1993) produced an eclectic body of work that was rarely exhibited in his lifetime. Despite a diversity of mediums and an equally wide range of subject matter, Overby returned consistently to the human form. His polyurethane stretches and ghost-like latex casts of walls and doors belong to the history of late 1960s and early 1970s experiments in Anti-Form, Process art, and post-Minimalism. His 1980s image paintings are post-Pop combinations of figure and abstraction that explore similar issues of surface, decay, and the skin between the real and its incorporeal other.
Robert Overby had a retrospective at the UCLA Hammer Museum, and his work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum; and The Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Edited by Alessandro Rabottini, Andrea Bellini, Martin Clark.
Texts by Andrea Bellini, Martin Clark, Robin Clark, Alison M. Gingeras, Terry R. Myers, Alessandro Rabottini.
