Robert Overby

Robert Overby’s oeuvre is a disenchanted reflection on the relationship between time and matter—a relationship the American artist has long rendered poetic with his sensitive investigations. This traveling retrospective curated by Alessandro Rabottini includes over fifty pieces, created between 1969 and 1987, and conveys the complexity of an eclectic and polysemous artistic practice maintained by a figure who existed outside of the main channels of 1970s Conceptual art. While Overby’s graphic work reveals an aptitude for assembling a diversity of texts and images—he trained as a graphic designer in postwar America—it is his transition to sculpture that resulted in his contributions to the ongoing discourse surrounding materials and the object. For the artist, from 1969 on, these concerns took the form of paintings, drawings, installations, and sculptures, wherein the technique of casting and architectural relief became expressive tools, as his use of perishable industrial materials examined the fissures of time. The exhibition includes examples such as the polyester-and-resin-cast Blue Screen Door, 1971, as well as latex and rubber panels from the “Barclay House Series,” 1971, twenty-eight casts of various architectural details that remained after a hotel was destroyed by a fire. The casts are as charged with physical and emotional energy as his oil-on-canvas works (Untitled [Monk Restoration], 1973), his collages (Untitled [Montage #4], 1976), and his lithographs (Untitled [Poli] Print 1, 1974). The artist explored this range of techniques with abandon over the course of his career, ceaselessly juxtaposing conceptual attitudes with a figurative vocabulary. The exhibition at GAMeC conveys the intimate, introspective aspects of his works, and its thematic categories—identity, Eros, the body, and the object—initiate a debate about the fate of various artworks brought together in exhibition, but it also prompts insight into the nature of objects that have been sculpted by the passage of time as well as by the artist’s hand.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.