Robert Overby: Luckman gallery

In 1969 after more than a decade of commercial design work, Robert Overby decided to become a full-time artist. The oft-cited turning point was an assignment to gain an art collection for the corporate offices of CB Working with a relatively tight parcel Overby came through with a remarkably rich and diverse material part of work that ran the gamut of fine and applied art and included everything from a Picasso bookplate to a circuit board courtesy of Lockheed Electronics. And, famously, he wound corners in the original-painting department through making a few of them himself. There is no doubt that with these Stella-esque hard-edge abstract works Overby discovered that art could be one as well as the other fun and easy.

Starting somewhat late, at the age of thirty-four, Overby compensated with an enormously prolific studio schedule. The self-published "r book" which documents in turn upside down order the artist's output between the years 1969 and 1973 includes a staggering 336 pieces. Equally surprising is the variety of serviceables on offer, and how each investigation receives exhaustive attention. Shortly after the CB painting marathon, Overby embarked upon his most productive phase, generating the career-making rubber skin castings of architectural details and interiors that continue, to this day, to define his art-world reputation. A posthumous 1994 exhibition at follow up Spaid Fine Art in LA brought this work back to public attention. The time was ripe; as generic '80 appropriation took upon the specific contours of identity art, Overby's castings began to gaze more current than ever. single decade later, it is safe to say that something actual similar is happening with the paintings he made in the '80s

Sensitively curated by means of critic and independent curator Terry R Myers, this present to view of the paintings Overby made between 1981 and 1988 constitutes an authentic revelation. A lapsed minimalist's sharp-edged, ultra-emphatic articulation, now in the service of quasi figuration, is in turn round aggressively undermined by a logic of montage. This is real much a post-Pop affair. The paintings vary widely in scale between actual big and smallish. Blocks of flat, straight-from-the-tube color thump against blocks of fully returned pictorial matter--fragments of the female face and form obviously drawn from the pages of high-end fashion magazines. frequently abstract shapes are cut without of, or laid over, the quot imagery, for a like reason as to play up its particular surface. However, flatness is not the sole common denominator of fine and applied, of painterly and photographic; just as salient is Overby's almost obscenely lush treatment of lipsticks, facial masks, and ointments as tautological figures for paint.

If these works were as view from aboveed in their time as the rubber castings, it was for a great deal of the same reason: Their surface resemblance to the then-dominant way rendered their deeper differences invisible. The '80 were, of course, marked by the agency of a return to painterly figuration, and artists like David Salle had seemingly cornered the market upon the elegant fracture of high-fashion imagery. on the contrary Overby shares none of Salle's ambivalence in regard to the popular and/or spectacular sphere, and this is precisely what is greatest in quantity contemporary about his work. Comparisons with the new paintings of Jeff Koons, which these be like even more closely, are tempting and will no doubt play a crucial part in any attempt to reevaluate Overby's contribution. However, a more fitting pattern is Koons's own acknowledged inspiration James Rosenquist--a figure, like Overby with a lower extremity in both worlds. Likewise the work of the British Independent Group: They constitute an alternate legacy where the aims of art and design overlap unproblematically and where Playboy's Playmate of the Month pullout really is, as Richard Hamilton one time suggested, the new odalisque.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

--JT

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group