Robert Yarber (born

Dallas Dallas () is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of Texas metropolitan areas, most populous metropolitan area in Texas and the Metropolitan statistical area, fourth-most ...

, Texas, 1948) is an American painter and Professor of Art at

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsyl ...

. He received a BFA from

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly known as Cooper Union, is a private college on Cooper Square in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-s ...

in 1971, and an MFA from

Louisiana State University Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as Louisiana State University (LSU), is an American Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louis ...

in 1973. Yarber gained international attention when his work was included in "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade", an exhibit organized by the

New Museum The New Museum of Contemporary Art is a museum at 235 Bowery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker. History The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-nam ...

for display in the American Pavilion at the 41st

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale ( ; ) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy. There are two main components of the festival, known as the Art Biennale () and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Architecture Biennale (), ...

in 1984. At the Venice Biennale, he was one of twenty-four artists (including Roger Brown, Rev. Howard Finster, Cheryl Laemmle,

Jedd Garet Jedd Garet is an American sculptor, painter and printmaker, who was born in 1955. He was raised in California, studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Influenced by ...

April Gornik : April Gornik (born 1953, Cleveland, Ohio) is an American artist who paints American landscapes. Her realist yet dreamlike paintings and drawings embody oppositions and speak to America's historically conflicted relationship with nature. While ...

, and

Eric Fischl Eric Fischl (born March 9, 1948) is an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman and educator. He is known for his paintings depicting American suburbia from the 1970s and 1980s. Life Fischl was born in New York City and grew up on s ...

) represented in the United States pavilion. Yarber gained further prominence with his inclusion in the

Whitney Biennial The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932; the first biennial was held in 1973. It is considered ...

in 1985. In 1990, Yarber, along with artists Janet Woolley,

Jenny Holzer Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. Her work focuses on the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projectio ...

and the illustrators Lou Brooks and Marvin Mattelson, participated in an MTV advertising campaign in

Rolling Stone magazine ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. The magazine was first known ...

that allowed them the freedom to create an illustration without specific requirements. Yarber has been credited with influencing the

Terry Gilliam Terrence Vance Gilliam ( ; born 22 November 1940) is an American-British filmmaker, comedian, collage film, collage animator, and actor. He gained stardom as a member of the Monty Python comedy troupe alongside John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Pa ...

film ''

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream'' is a 1971 novel in the gonzo journalism style by Hunter S. Thompson. The book is a ''roman à clef'', rooted in autobiographical incidents. The story fol ...

'' (1998). According to cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, the look of the film was influenced by Yarber's paintings that are "Very hallucinatory: the paintings use all kinds of neon colors, and the light sources don't necessarily make sense." According to Gilliam, they used him as a guide "While mixing our palette of deeply disturbing fluorescent colors." He has been represented by the

Sonnabend Gallery Ileana Sonnabend (née Schapira, October 29, 1914 – October 21, 2007) was a Romanian-American art dealer of 20th-century art. The Sonnabend Gallery opened in Paris in 1962 and was instrumental in making American art of the 1960s known in Europe, ...

in New York, Marella Arte Contemporanea in

Milan Milan ( , , ; ) is a city in northern Italy, regional capital of Lombardy, the largest city in Italy by urban area and the List of cities in Italy, second-most-populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of nea ...

, Modernism Inc. in San Francisco, Reflex Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles, and other galleries in the United States and Europe. His most recent show Return of the Repressed opened for Los Angeles’s Nicodim Gallery in 2018. Its coverage has been featured in various art publications including Autre Magazine and Artillery Magazine. Critic Annabel Osberg of Artillery writes, “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.” His 2013 work Panic Pending inspired a collaboration with literary theorist Herbert Marks, who published a piece ''The Ugly Baby and the Beautiful Corpse: Robert Yarber’s Gnostic Comedy'' in that year’s ''Yearbook of Comparative Literature''. Yarber is perhaps best known for a series of paintings of flying and falling figures seen above cityscapes viewed at night. Yarber's works revolve around "combining antiquity with modernism." Two recent shows at Sonnabend Gallery in New York have highlighted Yarber's integration of non dual

Vedanta ''Vedanta'' (; , ), also known as ''Uttara Mīmāṃsā'', is one of the six orthodox (Āstika and nāstika, ''āstika'') traditions of Hindu philosophy and textual exegesis. The word ''Vedanta'' means 'conclusion of the Vedas', and encompa ...

and Upper Amazonian

Shamanism Shamanism is a spiritual practice that involves a practitioner (shaman) interacting with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct spirits or spiritual energies into ...

into his drawings and paintings. A graphic fiction is in the works based on the most recent show, "Irrational Exuberance."

References

External links

Yarber web site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yarber, Robert American artists Cooper Union alumni Louisiana State University alumni Pennsylvania State University faculty 1948 births Living people