Robert Gober's 'Tick Tock' Exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery Explores Time and Memory

Robert Gober's exhibition 'Tick Tock' at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York ran from February 23 to April 21, 2018. The show featured works spanning decades, beginning with a 1967 drawing of Icarus created when Gober was thirteen. This early piece establishes the exhibition's exploration of nonlinear time, where multiple moments coexist simultaneously. Fourteen pencil and pastel drawings depict smudged torsos with barred windows over hearts, suggesting imprisonment and escape. A series of sixteen assemblages repurpose studio leftovers into works evoking birth and death through symbols like dead leaves, broken eggshells, and soiled diapers. These pieces operate with metaphoric logic reminiscent of Joseph Cornell boxes. The exhibition concludes with a lifesize trapdoor sculpture leading to a distressed cellar door, modeled after one built by Gober's father. This work references Marcel Duchamp's 'Étant Donnés' but offers no peephole for revelation. Light leaks through cracks in the door, creating contradictory portents of redemption and entrapment. The cellar door functions as a metonym for the entire exhibition, inviting visitors into the artist's life without providing an exit. Visitors must loop back from this locked door to reappraise earlier works. Gober interweaves personal narratives with art-historical allusions to surrealism and minimalism, creating works that are both familiar and inscrutable. The exhibition was reviewed in the May 2018 issue of ArtReview.