Robert Yarber: Regard and abandon is the first survey of Yarber’s major paintings and works on paper from the 1980s through the 2010s, and his first solo exhibition in New York since Calaveras gnosticos in 2009 at Sonnabend.

While not immediately recognizable to the current generation, his mark on the American consciousness is indelible. Yarber first gained international recognition in the early 1980s. His inclusion in Paradise lost/Paradise regained: American visions of the new decade, an exhibit organized by the New Museum for display in the American Pavilion at the 41st Venice Biennale in 1984, and the 1985 Whitney Biennial injected him into the creative zeitgeist.

You’ve felt his influence before, even if he’s not on the tip of your tongue. His works and artistic imprint helped define the nihilistic hedonism of the 80s. The cinematic nature of his practice lent itself to film and television, and lots of it. Iconoclastic touchstones such as 1983’s The hunger and 2019’s Uncut gems feature his paintings prominently. In 1991, MTV highlighted his works in a series of television and print ads. (Pier, 1989, was among those included.) The artistic director of Terry Gilliam’s Fear and loathing in Las Vegas cited Yarber as a primary influence, as did David Lynch in stylizing Lost highway and Mulholland Drive. He’s omnipresent in the countercultural ether.

Regard and abandon features highlights from the two threads of composition that characterize the artist’s career.

First, the paintings. His epic, past-the-witching-hour cityscapes feature bodies, often falling or flying, reflecting artificial neon and fluorescent light from the topography that envelopes them. The collective luminescence of the figures in combination with the synthetic landscape is not so much saccharine as it is serene; most viewers of these works were born into similarly manmade environments and nurtured to consciousness while swaddled by the unnatural.

Next, the drawings. Conceived of during ayahuasca trips in Peru in 2005 and initially articulated at his studio in Kathmandu, Yarber eased-up on the high-contrast neons-on-black of his paintings, and let loose in pastels on white cotton-rag paper—the better not to see the skin, but to see through it to the shamanic aliens, Gods and deities, sea captains, and massive (yet somehow effeminate) dongs that populated the universes within his psychonautic adventures.

Taken together, the body of work included within this survey offers the first Stateside overview of Yarber’s international career, which is now well into its fifth decade.

(Text by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler)

Robert Yarber (b. 1948, Dallas, Texas) has exhibited nationally and internationally since the early eighties. Solo exhibitions include Regard and abandon, Nicodim, New York (2025, solo); Anamorphic! Sublime!, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2019, solo); Return of the repressed, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2018, solo); Panic pending, Reflex Amsterdam, Holland (2014, solo); Calaveras gnosticos, Sonnabend Gallery, New York (2009, solo); Sortie: the demonological survey, Kyungpook National University Art Museum, Daegu (2007, solo); Robert Yarber, Sonnabend Gallery, New York (1998, solo); Robert Yarber, Sonnabend Gallery, New York (1993, solo); Climax of the commonplace, Sonnabend Gallery, New York (1990, solo); Robert Yarber, Sonnabend Gallery, New York (1987, solo); and Robert Yarber, Sonnabend Gallery, New York (1985, solo). His works can be found in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The PaineWebber Art Collection, New York; The Broad Museum, Los Angeles; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.