Robert Overby
Black and Blue Binder and Other Works
March 6 through April 3, 2004
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Robert Overby. The artist had his first New York solo exhibition with Fredericks Freiser Gallery in 1996, three years after his death. Since then he has had a retrospective exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This exhibition coincides with a solo exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London and a survey of late paintings at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, California State University, Los Angeles. This will be the artist’s fourth solo with Fredericks Freiser Gallery.
Robert Overby (1935-1993) created an eclectic body of work which was rarely exhibited during his lifetime. Despite a diversity of mediums and an equally wide range of subject matter, Overby returned consistently to the human form, whether in the geometry of domestic architecture or the female nude. His polyurethane stretches and ghost-like latex casts of walls and doors belong to the history of late 60s and early 70s experiments in anti-form, process art, and post-minimalism. His paintings of the same period as well as his mid-70s pornographic wood cut-outs and 80s image paintings explore issues of fragmentation, decay, and disintegration with a more referential sensibility.
Black and Blue Binder and Other Works features four major paintings dating from 1973 to 1977 and 18 drawings dating from 1988 to 1992 excerpted from two of Overby’s drawing binders. These are among the last works made by the artist. Here the iconography ranges from fractured faces to color grids to 1940s-style pin-ups, yet thematically they recall the four paintings in the exhibition as well as the earlier latex casts in their uncanny sense of ruin and the loss inherent in any human representation. They also underline Overby’s infatuation with referencing genres both high and low.
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is located at 504 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery by telephone at (212) 633-6555, fax at (212) 367-9502, or email fredericksfreiser@nyc.rr.com. Find more information on Robert Overby or any of our artists at www.fredericksfreisergallery.com.