Artists & Works

STYLE: Sculpture,
landscape

Robert Lobe brings a fresh outlook to environmentally-aware sculpture. Working outdoors all year round, Lobe creates works like Windy Spot by enveloping trees, rocks, roots, or other pieces of landscape in sheets of aluminum. He pounds the aluminum until it duplicates the natural shapes, then finishes it in his studio. The completed works that result from this process can be seen as homages to nature or as commentary on mans growing alienation from nature. Like George Segal's white plaster figures, Lobe's work stands as a mute testimony to an absent living form.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Barry Walker, Sticks and Stones catalogue, Katonah museum, 6/91
"A dissatisfaction with wood as a medium, however, led him, in 1976, to begin considering...other media...Lobe uses aluminum in a repousse technique with natural configurations of trees and rocks as his matrix...he began to take sheets of aluminum into forests where he selects rock and tree formations which he hammers into freestanding and wall pieces. The lightness of the metal allows him to work in large scale...Although his technique at first appears to render a very true portrait of natural elements, the physical properties of aluminum belie this, causing a somewhat eerie transformation...by arbitrarily cropping his work and transporting it out of its natural setting, he underscores the artificiality of his objects..."

Charlotta Kotik, Brooklyn Museum, Four Americans, 2/89
"Most of the sculptors whose work commands out attention are neither trying to create radically new concepts nor trying to dissociate themselves from those created in the past...Although a great diversity of expression marks the present sculptural output, the sculptors most frequently chose a fully three-dimensionally developed object self-contained, relatively manageable, and executed in the more traditional materials—wood, metal, stone...This, the radical manifestations of the late 1960s and early 1970s...did not being a lasting rupture with the object-oriented past...Rather, the past is studies with cool detachment and full awareness of present needs. The process involved is analytical and selective, in keeping with the pragmatic and self-centered atmosphere of our culture...The result is the heterogeneity of recent sculpture...After the cerebral, strictly defined forms of Minimalism, interest in the constantly changing and frequently unpredictable forms of nature comes as no surprise....the inspiration drawn from natural history and science continues to contribute to the breadth of the current art scene... Lobe: Robert Lobe portrays nature's physical state using forms directly derived from a particular landscape configuration...his segments of natural settings have an abstract quality resulting primarily from their being removed from their original environment. Thus, isolating an imprint of the mundane configuration of a tree, a boulder, or a combination thereof, Lobe endows it with a power bestowed only on the unique...He scouts the countryside for a particular formation...When he selects his motif, he sets to work with sheets of aluminum...The sheet envelops the stones, roots and tree trunks and is pounded...Lobe works outdoors practically all year round, spending time in the studio only when finishing his pieces...American nature...gives power and form to his concepts and is an affirmation of his belief in physical matter. The matter itself, however, is not present...Although his art is frequently perceived as a commentary on man's alienation from nature, a sort of paradise Lost, Lobe himself sees his pieces, which result from intensely physical encounters with nature, as immobile machines and stresses the constructivist character of his work. His statement reflects our problematic and often destructive relationship with nature, suggesting a tragic misalignment. Ultimately, the beauty of nature's form repeatedly fills the artist with admiration and awe." Lobe statement from catalogue: "I am obsessed with the fact that these are machines. That physical objects are machinery and that machinery doesn't have to move to be machinery."