Deep Basin Sink

Robert Gober's (born in the United States, in 1954) practice is characterised by his manual reproductions of seemingly familiar objects, as hyper-realist as they are unsettling.
Deep Basin Sink belongs to a series of sculptures, begun in 1983, presenting sinks. Relieved of its tap and endowed with a curiously deep basin, this banal object becomes particularly strange, almost disturbing, with the two holes left by the missing parts creating a curious countenance.

Deep Basin Sink emerged while the AIDS epidemic was raging at a time when its means of transmission had not yet been identified: the sink expresses as much the obsession with hygiene as the stigmatisation of homosexuality, associated by the society of the time with uncleanliness. The sculpture suggests a troubling corporeal proximity as much as an absence.