Robert Overby
@ Rhona Hoffman Gallery
118 North Peoria Street Chicago, Illinois 60607
On view through Saturday, January 21st
Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present a selection of large-scale latex rubber works, canvas maps, and polyvinyl chloride works from the 1970’s by late Californian artist Robert Overby.
Robert Overby’s casts reveal the process by which they are made with an obsessive emphasis on imperfection, often embellishing detail to the extent that the artist’s direct recordings become almost fictional. Although Overby‘s work exemplifies many of the characteristics of postminimalism, his relationship to the ‘real’ is one defining characteristic that differentiates his work from that of American contemporaries such as Bruce Nauman or Claus Oldenburg. His casts of common objects (such as walls, socks, and navels) with no particular hierarchy ask us to consider the subjectivity of the record, as does his self-published Red Book: 336 to I, (1974) in which he meticulously documents every work of art he ever created between July 1969 and August 1973.
Robert Overby was born in Harvey, Illinois and lived and worked in Los Angeles, California. He attended the School of Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Center School, Los Angeles, and the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree. Overby worked as a professional graphic designer and received numerous awards for his work. Since his death in 1993, interest in Overby’s work has grown exponentially. In 2000, Overby’s works from the late 1960s and 1970s were posthumously exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum in a critically acclaimed survey exhibition titled Robert Overby: Parallel, 1978-1969, organized by Terry R. Myers. Since this pivotal exhibition, several museums have acquired major works by Overby including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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