Robert Yarber

Robert Yarber
Born November 18, 1948
Dallas,Texas
Nationality American
Education BFA Cooper Union, MFA Louisiana State University
Known for Painting

Robert Yarber (born Dallas, Texas, 1948) is an American painter and Distinguished Professor of Art at Pennsylvania State University. He received a BFA from Cooper Union in 1971, and an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1973.[1]

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 for display in the American Pavilion at the 41st Venice Biennale in 1984.[2] At the Venice Biennale, he was one of twenty-four artists (including Roger Brown, Rev. Howard Finster, Cheryl Laemmle, Jedd Garet, April Gornik, and Eric Fischl) represented in the United States pavilion.[3] Yarber gained further prominence with his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1985.[4] In 1990, Yarber, along with artists Janet Woolley, Jenny Holzer and the illustrators Lou Brooks and Marvin Mattelson, participated in a MTV advertising campaign in Rolling Stone magazine that allowed them the freedom to create an illustration without specific requirements.[5]

Yarber has been credited with influencing the Terry Gilliam film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (film), (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."[6] According to Gilliam, they used him as a guide "While mixing our palette of deeply disturbing fluorescent colors."[7]

He has been represented by the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Marella Arte Contemporanea in Milan, Modernism Inc. in San Francisco and other galleries in the United States and Europe.

Yarber is perhaps best known for a series of paintings of flying and falling figures seen above cityscapes viewed at night.[8] The main ideas of Yarber's work revolve around "combining antiquity with modernism." Two recent shows at Sonnabend Gallery in New York have highlighted Yarber's integration of non dual Vedanta and Upper Amazonian Shamanism into his drawings and paintings. A graphic fiction is in the works based on the most recent show, "Irrational Exuberance."[9]

References

  1. ↑ "Robert Yarber". PSU School of Visual Arts. Pennsylvania State University. Retrieved January 25, 2011.
  2. ↑ Ennis, Michael (February 1984). "Venetian Finds". Texas Monthly: 128–130.
  3. ↑ Shamam, Sanford Sivitz (1989). Robert Yarber Paintings: 1980–1988, Palmer Museum of Art, ISBN 0-911209-39-5.
  4. ↑ Wolff, Theodore F. (April 15, 1985). "The Whitney's Biennial. Eye-popping but incomplete...". The Christian Science Monitor.
  5. ↑ Louie, Elaine (August 5, 1990). "Style Makers; Noel Frankel, Creative Director, Advertising Agency". The New York Times. Retrieved February 10, 2011.
  6. ↑ Pizzello, Stephen (May 1998). "Gonzo Filmmaking". American Cinematographer. pp. 30–41.
  7. ↑ Pizzello, Stephen (May 1998). "Unholy Grail". American Cinematographer. pp. 42–47.
  8. ↑ Hagen, Charles (October 4, 1991). "Art in Review". The New York Times. Retrieved January 24, 2011.
  9. ↑ "Irrational Exuberence". at Robert Yarber website.

External links