Robert Overby

Despite his prolific and diverse practice, Robert Overby (1935–93) remains one of the best kept secrets in postwar American art. Rarely exhibiting during his lifetime, Overby—who worked for much of his life as a graphic designer in Los Angeles—nevertheless built up an extraordinary, multifaceted body of work encompassing sculpture, installation, painting, photography, print and collage. He is perhaps best known for his doors, windows and building facades cast in rubber, latex and concrete, a series of works that set off a rigorous period of experimentation with materials and a consistent exploration of the human condition and its decay. This monograph is published on the occasion of the first survey exhibition of the artist's work to be organized in Europe, which brings together more than 50 of Overby's works drawn from European and American collections.

Beginning in 1969, Robert Overby (1935-1993) produced an eclectic body of work that was rarely exhibited in his lifetime. Despite working in a diversity of media and an equally wide range of subject matter, Overby returned consistently to the human form. His polyurethane stretches and ghost-like latex casts of walls and doors belong to the history of late 1960s and early 1970s experiments in Anti-Form, Process art, and post-Minimalism. His 1980s image paintings are post-Pop combinations of figure and abstraction that explore similar issues of surface, decay and the skin between the real and its incorporeal other. Overby had a retrospective at the UCLA Hammer Museum, and his work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This book is a reprint of his first publication, 336 to 1 August 1973-July 1969, which he conceived, edited and designed himself. Published with the Estate of Robert Overby.