Tone-bar room map
Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Overby was a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer whose process-oriented practice prefigured the Postminimalist aesthetic of artists like Rachel Whiteread. Between 1970 and 1972 Overby used concrete, wax, latex, and canvas to create records of architectural spaces and quotidian objects, ranging from an entire living room to a single sock. To produce this work, he first applied latex to a hotel room’s interior wall. Then, using strips of canvas, he traced the wall’s two doorways, ceiling molding, and baseboards onto the cast, creating a to-scale map of the space. The room’s features became less identifiable after the artist transferred them to the canvas, bringing the work to the brink of abstraction. As Overby noted, through this condensed visual language, the "common object [is] seen not as the common object for itself, but by its existence as a form by transfer."
Artwork Details
- Title: Tone-bar room map
- Artist: Robert Overby (American, Harvey, Illinois 1935–1993 Los Angeles, California)
- Date: 1972
- Medium: Canvas
- Dimensions: 106 1/2 × 116 in. (270.5 × 294.6 cm)
- Classification: Textiles
- Credit Line: Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2015
- Object Number: 2015.237
- Rights and Reproduction: © Robert Overby
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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