The Museum of Modern Art, October 4, 2014–January 18, 2015

Gober made Slides of a Changing Painting over the course of one year (1982–83) in a modest storefront on East Seventh Street in Manhattan that served as his home and studio. As he painted on a small Masonite board, he photographed the process, documenting the imagery as it changed over time. At year’s end, Gober had accumulated more than one thousand slides, which he edited down to eighty-nine and organized into a slide projection that he showed at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York for one week in 1984. After the exhibition, Gober put the slides away. When he revisited the project around 1990, he realized that he had unknowingly employed many of the same images in his subsequent sculptures. Slides of a Changing Painting has continued to be generative; it provides a nearly complete index of Gober’s visual themes and vocabulary.