Robert Overby

Robert Overby, White Pillows, 1986-87. Oil on canvas, 84 x 77 in (213.4 x 195.6 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Robert Overby and Andrew Kreps Gallery

Aug 18-Oct 7, 2023

Opening Reception Friday, Aug 18

Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery is pleased to present the first Philadelphia exhibition of Robert Overby (1935–1993). 

Overby was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as at the Art Center School of Design and the Chouinard Art Institute, both in Los Angeles, where he spent most of his life. Overby created a multifaceted body of work that ranged from painting to installation that was rarely exhibited during his lifetime. He had a parallel career as a successful graphic designer, working with major clients such as the American Red Cross, CBS, Capital Records, Boeing, IBM, Lockheed Electronics, MGM and Toyota, which subsidized his more experimental and expansive approach to artmaking. 

In 1969, Overby had his first solo show at Chouinard Art School of Cal Arts, where he had studied and also taught graphic design, which consisted of large shaped hard-edged canvases. He then experimented with plastics and by 1971 was direct casting complete facades of buildings in liquid latex, which he would then peel off and exhibit. These and the related cotton duck and architectural frottage works Overby called “Baroque Minimalism,” paralleled the postminimalism of Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Paul Thek and Bruce Nauman. In the early 1970s, Overby spent time in New York where he made rubbings of rough wall and floor surfaces in Ralph Gibson’s studio. When his participation in a 1971 group exhibit at John Weber Gallery in SoHo was canceled, Overby went on his own path undeterred by market demands. He self-published “red book” titled Robert Overby: 336 to 1, August 1973–July 1969, which reproduced over 300 works from his vast stylistically heterogenous oeuvre. The five years between 1969 and 1974 were very prolific; he produced one artwork every five days for five years. 

Overby’s works play with codes of representation, authority and authenticity. In his diverse output, Overby created rubbings, serigraphs, offset prints, collages, assemblages, soft latex castings and cast metal sculptures, shaped canvases, monochromatic minimalist canvases and figurative appropriations. He refused to be bound to one style; his free praxis was a post-style position presenting prescient postmodernist thought. He often started with images or materials which were manipulated so that a sense of entropy was intrinsic to the situation. He used printmaking techniques to speak of mechanical reproduction, fade and decay. These were no mere Duchampian found objects but starting points that he reworked and applied diverse processes upon. Some of his prints were stark Pop motifs; others were simulated portraits and indefinite grey screens like scans from a surveillance camera. Trained as a graphic designer, he often used commercial silkscreens or offset lithography used in the poster industry as opposed to fine arts etching or lithography processes to produce his editions. He duplicated indexical architectural spaces through latex casts and sewn ghost replicas. He made paintings that mimicked old master Madonnas but also investigated images of bondage and contemporary pornography. In all of his artworks the end product was pushed to extremes and was visually graphic and unique as one of his trademark designs.  

Overby had solo exhibits at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (1979) and Jan Baum Gallery (1989). Posthumously, Overby received his first one-person exhibition in New York at Jessica Fredericks Gallery in 1996. Four years later, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which led to the major solo museum survey, Robert Overby: Works 1969–1987 produced by the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland which subsequently traveled to Bergamo, Italy, Bergen, Norway, and Dijon, France. His work was also been shown at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Cirrus Gallery; Hammer Museum; Grant Selwyn Gallery; Rubell Family Collection;  Rhona Hoffman Gallery; Robert Miller Gallery;  Fredericks & Freiser; and Haunch of Venison Gallery. His work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum; and Museum of Modern Art. His estate is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. We thank Linda Burnham for her assistance in this exhibition. 

Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.