Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by the late California artist Robert Overby. The show opens Saturday, February 12 and closes March 16, 2005.
This exhibition focuses on the idea of the door, which has been a seminal focus of the artist’s early work. The doors in this exhibition are all life-sized objects, which confront the viewer with the scale and presence of the human body. For Overby, the door became a reference to the passing of time, the passing from one space to another, and to the diversity and alchemy of his materials as he transformed objects from one medium into another.
This exhibition contains a selection of Overby’s cast-latex, plastic, canvas, neon and concrete pieces all completed between 1970 and 1972. Many of these works have not been exhibited since the 1970’s.
After a decade as a highly successful, award-winning graphic designer, Overby began his own art practice after completing a job as the curator of an art collection for CBS. His work spans a great variety of mediums and is meticulously documented in his self-published catalogue 336 to 1 August 1973 – July 1969, also known as the Red Book. This exhibition concentrates on an early portion of Overby’s early career as a fine artist, which began in 1969.
As Overby told Peter Clothier in 1986: “I see the door definitely as a body…the door’s also something that you set your scale by.”
Speaking specifically about Overby’s relationship with the doorway, Terry Meyers wrote in the catalogue for Overby’s Hammer Museum retrospective:
“…the door was an everyday object that provided a type of ‘seen but not known’ image… a door simultaneously symbolized, ‘human action’ and human presence…Given such burgeoning potential, can it be an accident that the first door, called Madonna Door, 5 October 1970, is literally pregnant with possibilities? Cast in transparent PVC from an old door from which some of the glass windowpanes had been removed to make room for a PVC and resin “belly,” it is an ethereal, ghostlike yet, with its many wrinkles and folds, blatantly substantive image, even when juxtaposed with an almost oxymoronic series of concrete screen doors (and parts of doors) that Overby cast at the same time…Overby’s finding the door could not have come at a better time; it can be argued that it literally “unlocked” his work, releasing it from the grip of self-referential formalism or process and moving it into the vernacular, even domestic places where he felt most comfortable.”
Robert Overby was born in Illinois in 1935 and died in Los Angeles in 1993. In May of 2000 The UCLA Hammer Museum presented the first retrospective of his work; Robert Overby: Parallel, 1978-1969 curated by Terry Meyers. This exhibition has sparked renewed interest in Robert Overby, as evidenced by a number of acquisitions of important works by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in North Carolina, among others.