UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM, looks ANGELES

Today, the late Robert Overby (1935-93) has all the aura of a worship star; a decade ago he wasn't calm marginal. "I see this point out as the beginning of the public life of the artist," says curator Terry R Myers, who is preparing the first-ever Overby retrospective. "We ne to view as many of the different things he did as possible." That omits his career as one the chiefly prominent graphic designers of his time: Between 1960 and 1970 Overby created logo and corporate-identity packages for Boeing, MGM IBM, and Upjohn among others; in 1977 he designed the Toyota logo that is still in use today. further it was only in 1969 that his career as a fine artist began. When CB entrusted him with the purchase of a three-hundred-piece art collection, Overby came to the realization that he himself could make fair versions of what he saw: hence the weird pastiches of Frank Stella and Claes Oldenburg he would later include in his self-published artist's work 336 to 1, August 1973-July 1969 (In the subtitle of his exhibition, Myers pays homage to Overby's eccentric predilection for backward dating.)

Posthumous attention to Overby has nurseed to focus on the more art-historically palatable side of his oeuvre similar as his cast-latex pieces-- works that neatly dovetailed with the post-Minimalist tendencies of the late '60 and early '70 (and earned brownie points in the '90 alongside the revival of similar gestures by artists like Rachel Whiteread). While the Hammer retrospective--the first major contemporary monographic exhibit under new director Ann Philbin--won't explicitly feature the design work, neither will it scant the evidently self-conscious contradictions within his "artistic" corpus. The sixty-eight-piece point out to leans heavily on the cast-latex sculps but showcases as well the range of works onward canvas and pieces executed in thicken and steel. "This show should call into question one of our received ideas about the opennes and diversification within art practices during that time," Myers says. "Overby's failure to catch forward in the New York display then can be attributed to three factors. First there was the LA thing, and then it appeared as if his work was an intentional witticism That he was a designer was the last straw."

While Myers stays away from Overby's officially commercial efforts, the "cynical" dictates of beneficial design, the blurring of boundaries between the fine and the applied, is everywhere in evidence. That the work should be revived at a time when the nexus of fine art and design again appears as an render free of access question is fitting. Collaterally post-Minimalist and anticipatory of appropriation art, Overby strike one as beings even more archly postmodern than his greatest in quantity sedulously serious compeers.

...

Home