Gobby: Shadows of a Man
Blank Forms
Brooklyn, NY 11238
For ten days in December, Blank Forms presents a temporary installation of Gobby’s illustrations, activated by intermittent performances from the artist. Shadows of a Man will be on view from Wednesday, December 3rd, to Friday, December 12th. The Blank Forms gallery will be open weekdays from 10am–6pm; Gobby will perform at 10am and 4pm on Wednesday the 3rd and Thursday the 4th, as well as 3pm on Sunday the 14th.
The delicate pencil drawings of Shadows of a Man depict a cartoonish, humanoid figure in assorted sparse tableaux: in bed, standing on the hood of a car, or accompanied by cans of beer. Gobby first purchased the figure at a flea market in Brooklyn fifteen years ago, drawn to its ambiguous expression—the character’s arched, severe eyebrows suggest a deviousness belied by its wide eyes and rosy cheeks—but knowing little else about it. When the doll’s neck broke, spurring Gobby to purchase a replacement, he discovered it wasn’t just any mass-produced toy, but a Czech character named Spejbl. Originating as a wooden marionette, hand-carved by Josef Skupa in the 1920s, Spejbl has been reborn several times in the intervening century: as the star of animated films and television series, and as the namesake for a minor planet. Gobby’s decontextualized portraits, which depict Spejbl nearly disappearing into the ether, suggest the loss of this history in the figure’s transposition from early 20th-century Czechoslovakia to contemporary Brooklyn.
Boston-born, self-taught producer and illustrator Gobby is a through-and-through maximalist, the kind of artist who revels in layering a comically wide range of genres, from spaghetti western soundtracks to trap music to metal-meets-medieval dungeon synth. His signature sound—omnivorous, restless—is marked by the continual adoption and abandonment of musical ideas, to astonishing narrative effect. His recent dUWU (2025) opens with a mix of Scottish rockers Del Amitri’s 1995 “Roll to Me,” heavily filtered as though overheard blasting from a faraway car, and moves through crumbling washes, harsh buzzers, and nasal synthetic melodies toward a chopped ‘n’ screwed remix of K-pop megastars NewJeans and a slicked-back version of Bach’s cantata “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” also known as “Sleepers, Awake!”
Blank Forms’s gallery space is located on the third floor of 468 Grand Ave in Clinton Hill. There is a step down from the street into the building and two flights of stairs—thirty-five in total, plus a hand rail—up to the gallery. If you require help accessing the space, please contact izzy@blankforms.org.