Slides of a Changing Painting is a new artist book by Robert Gober that takes as its point of departure the artist’s highly influential, yet rarely seen, early work of the same name—a slide presentation documenting a year-long evolution of a single painting. Presented at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1984 with three projectors and 89 slides, the work showcased themes and subjects that would become central to Gober’s oeuvre and in hindsight, has come to be seen as a career-spanning lexicon for the artist’s practice. This artist book has been designed to replicate the experience of the original installation, with 89 images dissolving into each other over the course of 368 pages, creating what Gober has referred to as the “memoir of a painting.” This is the first time that Slides of a Changing Painting has been showcased in its entirety in book form.

From 1982-83, Gober worked on Slides of a Changing Painting in his East 7th Street storefront, documenting the process as he repeatedly painted on a single Masonite board, reworking imagery or else starting over entirely. Motifs that would become important to his later sculptures and installations make their first appearances here, such as drains, pipes, flowing water, forests, lost garments, sinks, windows, and bare chests pierced with trees and waterfalls. His treatment of the human body here lays the groundwork for some of his most uncanny and surrealistic works. Made against the backdrop of cultural conservatism and an unchecked health epidemic that was rampant in the 1980s, Slides of a Changing Painting contains a bewildering mixture of dread and hope, with Gober’s queer identity and artistic sensibilities coming into remarkable focus—demonstrating a sense of vision that few artists have so early in their careers.

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Editor: James Hoff
Designer: Bryce Wilner