Robert Yarber
Nicodim is proud to present Robert Yarber: Anamorphic! Sublime!, an exhibition of psychedelic works on paper at the gallery’s location in Bucharest. Yarber’s drawings conjure the transcendent and approach the sublime through comic iconography, weaving together the allegorical, the mythical, the apocalyptic, the miraculous, and the outrageous.
With the mentality of a perverted carnival-barker plying his trade in the overcrowded marketplace of visual symbolism, Yarber speaks through a bizarre cast of characters, exhortations, and props. Narratives are driven by floating skulls and sea captains, skeletal tricksters, grim reapers, gold bars, and exploding cigars, calling-out as if to mock the eternal recurrence of meaning itself. Something is always imitating something else. The Thing featured in his work has emerged from another thing. Yet the twitch to understand the meaning of the this or that in the drawings and what its for never truly dies; the inner-ear always yearns to feel the buzz.
Robert Yarber was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. He first achieved international acclaim with his inclusion in Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade, an exhibit organized by the New Museum for display in the American Pavilion at the 41st Venice Biennale in 1984. Yarber gained further prominence with his selection to the 1985 Whitney Biennial.
Yarber received a BFA from Cooper Union in 1971 and an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1973. Throughout the years, he has exhibited with Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Asher/Faure Gallery in Los Angeles, and Modernism in San Francisco, among others in Europe and America. Yarber is a Distinguished Professor of Art at Pennsylvania State University. His work is in the permanent collections of the Broad Family Collection, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Denver Art Museum; Paine-Webber Collection, New York; Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, and many others.