Untitled
- Artist: Robert Gober
- Date: 1989–92
- Medium: Wax, wood, leather, fabric and human hair
- Dimensions: object: 300 x 160 x 515 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the “Untitled” by Robert Gober, created between 1989 and 1992. The sculpture is a wax cast of a lower human leg, finished with wood, leather, fabric and strands of purchased human hair. Gober says the wax was bleached from his own leg and the hair was implanted one by one with a handmade tool, a painstaking process that took hours.
The piece is driven by two vivid memories: a story his mother told him as a child about an amputated leg handed over in an operating theatre, and a later moment when a fellow passenger exposed a sliver of bare skin while crossing legs on a flight. These encounters give the work its uncanny, intimate tension.
Though only about thirty centimetres long, the sculpture’s detail is striking. Gober turns a familiar body part into a fragile, uncanny object that compels viewers to pause and confront the ordinary with an unsettling familiarity.
See it in person
Untitled is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
