Robert Lobe

Born in 1945 in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Robert Lobe studied art techniques at Oberlin College before completing his formal studies at Hunter College in 1968. By 1969, Lobe's sculpture attained national recognition when his work was prominently featured in the first of many museum exhibitions in which it would be included: the Whitney Museum’s famed exhibit, “Anti-Illusion.”

Lobe’s sculptures investigate the divide between representation and abstraction. After having chosen a specific landscape configuration, most often incorporating rocks and trees, he sculpts sheets of aluminum to its spatial outlines using a repoussé technique. Translated into a uniform metallic surface, nature’s unique imprints are stripped of their color, detail, and texture – taking on an abstract quality underscored by explicit cropping and displacement from their original environments.

Although it is possible to read his work as a commentary on the relationship between the manufactured and organic, Lobe emphasizes its constructivist influences. “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,” he writes. Perceived in these terms, his sculptures are not only haunting spectral images of nature abstracted, they represent an extreme re-contextualization of mechanical materials – stretching the parameters of industrial forms and methodologies.

Robert Lobe has exhibited extensively in important solo- exhibitions and group shows. His works have been included in such major collections as the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He lives and works in New York City.