Sacred Places

In this series, Gaber starts from drawing as a foundational medium of his creative process. First, Gaber portrays through freehand drawing a habitat that interests him as a source. At a later stage, he creates embroidery drawings with cotton thread on linen from the original drawing, thus appealing to a more intimate experience on the part of the viewer, as well as alluding to the very personal and indelible meaning that each of these spaces keeps for its custodian. In this case, the artist has decided to portray the environment he knows — houses in which he has lived or houses of people within his immediate circle. Gaber is not interested in making a literal portrait of spaces, nor accurately reproducing what the eye sees, but from a first drawing and through a process of abstraction, collect the formal or stylistic characteristics of the space and with it, perhaps, provoke a portrait of who inhabits them. The places of reference are always houses — containers of memory and personal identity — which, after being portrayed, are dislocated from their literalness to form paintings of a timeless aesthetic. Sacred Places is Gaber’s series that most directly draws on architecture. The artist is interested in his registration of inhabited space as a continent and modifier of human experience. Santiago Toca, Curator