“He is an artist whose images and processes are deeply engaged with the everyday and at the same time profoundly disruptive of it.” —Ann Temkin

In this sculpture a wedge of cheese seems to have grown a layer of fine human hair. Short Haired Cheese is an early example of Gober’s handmade sculptures of commonplace subjects that have been rendered otherworldly through slight alterations in their appearance.

Throughout his career Gober has produced works based on food, including a grandly scaled sculpture of a stick of butter atop its wrapper and photographs of cooked and uncooked chickens. In the words of Hilton Als, “Gober’s food is about the impermanence of the things we take into ourselves and turn into something else — energy, the memory of a taste — with that machine known as our body.”