
Robert Yarber
Vista, 2018
oil and acrylic on canvas
72 x 96 in
182 x 244 cm
Robert Yarber
Error's Triumph, 2018
oil on canvas
72 x 132 in.
182.75 x 335.25 cm.
Robert Yarber
Layover, 1987
oil on canvas
72 x 120 in.
182.88 x 304.80 cm.
Robert Yarber
Contemplation of the Absolute, 1993
oil on canvas
68 x 96 in.
172.72 x 243.84 cm.
Robert Yarber
Gas and Limited Oxygen, 2018
oil and acrylic on canvas
72 x 132 in.
182 x 335 cm.
Robert Yarber
Crowds and Power, 2018
oil and acrylic on canvas
72 x 132 in.
182 x 335 cm.
Robert Yarber
Theater, 2018
oil and acrylic on canvas
72 x 132 in
182 x 335 cm
Robert Yarber
Error's Conquest, 1987
oil on canvas
71 x 129.50 in.
180.34 x 328.93 cm.
Robert Yarber
The Magus of Turin, 1993
oil and acrylic on canvas
84 x 84 in.
213 x 213 cm.
Robert Yarber
Seance with False Medium Trumpet Call from the Beyond, 1993
acrylic on canvas
68 x 96 in.
172 x 243 cm.
Nicodim Gallery is proud to announce Robert Yarber: Return of the Repressed, an exhibition of new and classic paintings, his debut at the gallery and his first solo show in Los Angeles in over twenty years.
You’ve seen Robert Yarber’s works before, even if you’ve never seen them. Figures falling, flying, flailing in the night, perhaps due to some chemically induced apraxia (intentional or otherwise), living in the best or worst moment of some bad decision. Yarber has pioneered a language of levitation where leaving the ground is a leap of faith without compass, his characters suspended within a transcendental aspic. The simultaneous flood of immediacy and nostalgia is disorienting and thrilling—his paintings are a cutting visual counterpoint to critical theory, anchored through dramaturgical events and eclipses of subjecthood. Backlit and reflecting a palette at once surreal and familiar, his forms summon those of Tintoretto on an acid trip, or maybe Titian on ecstasy. While his forbearers looked up to the heavens, however, Yarber’s is the iridescent chiaroscuro of nightlife long past the witching hour.
And those skylines! You’ve been there, you swear. Is it Los Angeles? Vegas? Dallas? Long Island? In an allusion to the harsh, super-hot chromaticism of technicolor film from the mid-20th century, Yarber’s stark, fluorescent colors dramatically emerge from their largely black backgrounds, lurid neons piercing the darkness. The gaudy design of the motels, the swimming pools, the diners, the movie theaters, the coastlines in the work is distinctly American, yet could exist nearly anywhere and anytime in the country over the past fifty years. “The mind is a suspicious character,” they seem to whisper. Robert Yarber: Return of the Repressed represents the most meaningful conversation you’ve had while blackout drunk, the best sex you’ve almost had, and every unforgettable moment that you can’t quite remember.
— Ben Lee Ritchie Handler
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.
Influenced by cinema, especially the denaturalized space and lighting that one finds in film noir, Yarber is forever pushing up against what is impossible versus plausible. Blind in one eye since birth, he knows he’s seeing it “wrong” but that just means that in these soft-core phantasmagorias he’s only painting what he sees. The flatness, the compression and expansion of pictorial space, and the dream-logic phenomenology of internal cohesion despite intense weirdness all contribute to creating a masterful externalization of a set of internal realities. Freud would be proud....
"Cannabis helped me release any tensions that would block the visualization process,” Yarber said. “It permitted me to enter the plane of the image, and to permeate myself within the scene. The mind-body split would be reduced or diminished, so suddenly the body was in the mind and there was a permission to explore there. There was somatic integration with the visuals as well. The colors would be enhanced. The spatial relationship would be enhanced. I’d be unburdened.”
Yarber notes he may have come to those creative heights anyhow, but remains grateful to the “great gift the plant has given me.”
L.A.’s Nicodim Gallery is kicking off a new series of gallery events and exhibitions it aptly calls INFLUENCES. The series explores the complex relationships between artistic creation and psychoactive substances. And its first installment is an event centered around the works of painter Robert Yarber... In a word, Yarber’s paintings couldn’t be more perfect for a gallery series exploring the influence of drugs on art. But no other gallery has gone so far as to invite the artist to curate a selection of cannabis strains for viewers of each particular work.
'I just gravitated towards the drama of gravity being overthrown. That’s just part of the drama, the fact that we’re all stuck here. And also, it had to do with the history of dream lore, my own personal experience of dreaming of levitation and flying. Later, during many openings where I would show this kind of work, people would come up and discuss their own flying dreams, and it worked into about a 50/50 break between people that flew like Superman: extending their arms and propelling themselves by their will, and people who flapped and used their locomotive motion. I happened to be one that flapped...'
“What’s returning and why was it repressed?” asks Ben Lee Ritchie Handler of Robert Yarber at the press preview for the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over twenty years. The double entendres abound and the disarming deconstruction of the artist’s psyche takes a crystal clear focus. The loss of innocence, the loss of control, the liberation therein.
Falling figures set against illuminated cityscapes painted in acid colors. That’s what you’ll see in Yarber’s latest exhibition, which brings together paintings old and new — and which the news release touts as the kind of experience that will be like “the most meaningful conversation you’ve had while blackout drunk, the best sex you’ve almost had, and every unforgettable moment that you can’t quite remember.” I’ll take that.
Robert Yarber‘s spellbinding nocturnal realms feel at once familiar and otherworldly. Each of his paintings is far weirder than the sum of its parts, with generic characters and unplaceable urban locales coalescing into bizarre, morbid scenarios. Yarber’s large-scale paintings appear as fantastic dreamlike visions, but the more you stare, the more his eerie febrile scenes seem like nightmares, with you, the voyeuristic viewer, plummeting into glowing streets alongside his protagonists.