Robert Gober’s rich and unsettling iconography—from the dysfunctional sinks and handcrafted furniture to the truncated body parts and storm drains—has unfolded sequentially over the past 25 years. Each new work seemed unprecedented and startlingly fresh in its bold narrative form. But much of Gober’s innovative vocabulary was already articulated in his early Slides of a Changing Painting (1982–83), which documents the permutations of a single canvas that he altered over a year’s time, photographing each modification until he had thousands of individual records. Whittled down to 89 slides, the piece functions today as a key to Gober’s practice. Projected in sequence, each image morphs into another, revealing a transformative process at work: a human body becomes a landscape and then an architectural interior, stairs descend a man’s chest into a basement, a culvert pipe diverts a stream across a torso. Water is a pervasive presence throughout; it cascades down a mountainside, forges a stream through a woman’s breastbone, and pours forth from cantilevered drainpipes. Gober has repeatedly returned to this mutating inventory as sources for his work. It is almost a map of his creative unconscious.

The culvert pipe was not realized in sculptural form until 1994, when Gober began three enigmatic pieces: an oversize box of tissues penetrated by a metal pipe, an armchair impaled by this same drain pipe, and a huge box of lard divided by a cruciform of pipes. These juxtapositions of domestic objects with industrial conduits metonymically connect Gober’s previous furniture pieces—beds, cribs, dog baskets—to his earlier sinks, which, like the culverts, are vehicles for water. The artist revisited this sculptural equation and its intimations of sexual aggression in his epic 1997 installation that included a life-size Madonna figure pierced through the center by a culvert pipe—a complex, haunting symbol amidst an environment of running water and storm drains.

In this untitled piece, a six-foot culvert uncannily and inexplicably penetrates a willow basket, once again creating a surreal image linking motifs in Gober’s oeuvre. The oversize basket, handwoven by the artist, harks back to his dog beds of the mid-1980s, their pillows imprinted with quaint yet menacing images of geese and stags, favored prey of hunting canines. The gothic connotations of those works resonate in the present sculpture, particularly in its pierced state. It is interesting to note that Gober’s initial concept for his 1997 installation—in which the secular, sacred, and psychological are fused—involved the placement of a large, woven basket in the center of the gallery, the space eventually occupied by the Virgin Mary.