Robert Obier
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Robert Obier is an experimental mixed-media artist with a background in architecture and industrial design who has exhibited across the United States. Recent exhibitions and art fairs include Art Miami, Intersect Aspen Art + Design Fair, Marietta Cobb Museum of Art in Georgia, and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. Robert has been published in White Hot Magazine and MuseumWeek.
A cross between grand art deco, futurism, steam-punk, industrial-punk, and cyber-punk, Robert Obier has created an eclectic style of art based on various mixed-media materials, such as 3-D printing resin and wood. These machinations and aggressive constructs are often angular, yet carefully symmetrical, rusticly colorful, and presented in a self-contained framed manner. Robert Obier’s most notable body of work would be the Speedforms series, as this collection has the greatest highlights of art deco aesthetics, but infused with a hyper-futuristic appearance which makes these mixed-media sculptures look more like intergalactic portals, rather than conventional works of art. In these ‘portals’, the central composition typically contains a vehicle-like-shaped apparatus fixated within the center of the composition. This elastic, angular, and distorted central component also has similar appearances to what would be regarded as a futuristic engine, perhaps the component of a non-fixed-wing aircraft or retro-fitted yet elongated automobile.
Such fascination between vintage aesthetics with fantasy lore creates a vivid distortion which is both appealing and contemplative. Like the grand schematic of an elaborate science fiction novel, the Speedforms and Abstract series by Robert Obier presents machine-like angularity and geometric aesthetic with a pristine finish. The painted surface of these mixed media works, with their sleek composition, are rustic yet colorful which brings an almost organic feel to these steel-appearing constructs. With a dichotomy between life-essence with the coloring and cold machine metal aesthetics with the form and surfaces, Robert Obier creates artworks which are fluid yet static, cold yet lively. This constant contradiction creates a heightened sense of visual stimulation and curiosity of these ‘entities’ as an anomaly of both science and art.
Formula 1X - Artist Proof #1 - Ferrari Red (picture above) best exemplifies the contradictory traits within Robert Obier’s portfolio. Colorful yet cold, rustic yet lively, angular yet geometric. This construct reveals a composition which is both hallucinogenic and portal-like, as if this were the grand vehicle of a futuristic nomad trekking the post-apocalyptic future and wasteland in their shiny, new mobile passenger craft.
Experimental and lucid, the mixed-media works of Robert Obier go beyond conventional notions of sculpture or three-dimensional art and into constructs which feel like they are as much scientific as they are artistic. These smooth yet aggressively-shaped framed compositions convey a musical angularity which poses as futuristic vehicles and celestial portals with expansive fantastical connotations. Such imaginative works by Robert Obier portray how the visual arts can be exciting when combining several notable styles into a singular entity, with an integrative approach which is both imagined and inspired.
