I saw this Robert Gober Plywood at Boesky in 1998, and it blew my Gober sink- and crib- and leg-addled mind. Now it’s for sale.
Gober was already fluent in sinks and beds by 1987 and was seeking to try to make, he said, an abstract sculpture. “What I ended up making is an extremely realistic sculpture of a more or less abstract object.”
The faces are indeed realistic, the kind of rough veneer used to manufacture plywood. Gober got Peter Ballantine’s help to get a minimum order of veneer—one flatbed truckful—from a mill in Oregon. Yet he did not make a truckful of sculptures from it, just two.
In addition to the artisanal dimensions, the Goberian handcrafted moment here is the edges, which are built up from 1/8-inch strips like marquetry to resemble the internal plys of manufactured wood, and to hide the particleboard core within.
I tried to zoom in on Christie’s photo to show the detail of the edges, and it dissolved into what looked like CG or a Sylvia Plimack Mangold, keeping the abstract/realist tension alive.
I love that he signed the very ↑TOP↑ edge. It goes on view—presumably, face out—on Friday, the 25th, for a week.
[this weekend update] thanks to greg.org hero Ian for sending this photo of the handmade edge of Gober’s Plywood. This is the good stuff:
1 Oct 2026, Lot 344, Robert Gober, Plywood, 1987, est. $400-600,000 [update: did not sell] [christies]