Paula Cooper

Andrei Koschmieder, Robert Gober

03 Nov - 20 Dec 2017

Installation view
ANDREI KOSCHMIEDER, ROBERT GOBER
3 November – 20 December 2017

Curated By Laura Hunt

NEW YORK – Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present Andrei Koschmieder, Robert Gober opening November 3 at 529 West 21st Street. This is the first in a series of presentations at Paula Cooper Gallery’s 529 West 21st Street space curated by Laura Hunt, the gallery’s archivist. There will be an opening reception on Friday, November 3 from 6 to 8pm.

Andrei Koschmieder, who shares an advanced sense of humor with Robert Gober as well as a tendency to recast what his surroundings repeat, has created new work for this show: a group of pipes constructed with cardboard, tape, spackle, glue, and aluminum paint. Koschmieder’s pipes are alternately blank and embedded with tiny photos of hyper-legible urban transactions: the drug deal, the subway transfer, the drink order. In this new group the bezels illustrate liquid at varying levels in a glass. In this way the pipes have more to do with idiom and visual processing than plumbing.

On view by Gober is Untitled (Pair of Brains), 1982, a rarely seen1 early sculpture made shortly before his seminal work Slides of a Changing Painting (1982-83).2 Roughly formed from plaster and wire lath and small enough to be handheld, the two brains are textured and carved longitudinally, though not deeply grooved or articulated; they appear to still be in the process of developing. In visual terms, they are as likely to be animal as human. The artist’s positioning of a pair, rather than a single organ, automatically sets up an interaction, and, though it is left mysterious whether that interaction is social or simply physical, it is, by construction, equal.

Andrei Koschmieder, Robert Gober is a collaboration with Real Fine Arts.

The work has been exhibited once before in “Robert Gober: Sculpture and Drawing,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 1999; traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, 2000. ↩

Ann Temkin, ed. Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor. exh. cat., New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015, 127. ↩
 

Tags: Robert Gober, Andrei Koschmieder