Robert Grober:

Slides of A Changing Painting

Robert Gober’s Slides of a Changing Painting is one of the American artist’s earliest works, presenting the evolution of a single painting over the course of one year. The development of the painting, chronicled via photography, reveals the artist’s transformation of the small board’s surface into a vast and varied platform of themes, objects, and landscapes. Many of the artist’s later preoccupations with the cropped human figure and images of water appear—fleetingly—throughout the course of this work. Mobilized via photography, Gober’s lost paintings are reconstituted as a visual diary, a record of the year in which he produced this installation.

Slides of A Changing Painting does not move in a linear direction; it is a series of beginnings without endings, openings to different worlds without closing previous settings. While its rhythm is that of a constant, pure beat, the work is remarkable for how it remains unpredictable nonetheless. It is the absence of order or regularity that invites comparison to the fluid, unanchored scenes that populate our dreams and memory. Whether Gober’s work presents memories of the artist’s that have been recombined graphically or dream-like visions that interweave the familiar with the unknown is unclear. What is viscerally apparent, however, is that the experience of viewing Slides of A Changing Painting is similar to the narrative of our own dreams. Parts or details are clear and recognizable, but their sequence remains frustratingly unresolved.

Robert Gober was born in 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut. His works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. He lives and works in New York.