Tiny prison windows appear in Robert Gober’s recently completed wall-mounted box sculptures at Matthew Marks Gallery, recalling the artist’s iconic barred windows and suggesting a place of confinement. This untitled sculpture adds meticulously hand-crafted window blinds and a rendition of Edouard Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels,’ affixed to the back wall behind a fragile-looking non-functional lightbulb. Pierced on the wrong side and iconographically incorrect in Manet’s ridiculed 1864 version, Gober’s Christ is missing the angels that would place the body in a timeline that leads to resurrection. Adding to the suggestion of stasis or failure, two cigarettes and a toothpick on the box’s floor suggest that someone has been waiting but perhaps, as the barred windows and nonfunctional light suggest, not seeing. (On view in Chelsea through April 18th).
