Upon seeing Robert Gober’s work, you may be like woah man what’s with the hand-washing obsession because most of his work consists of sinks.

But then it clicks and you realize that he’s a fuggin’ genius because he “uses storytelling imagery to humanize the stark matter-of-factness of minimalist aesthetics” or whatever.

The sink thing could either be a severe case of OCD or just a result of his passion for carpentry as a youngin. He had a knack for making art derivative of things that are familiar to him, like sinks, doors, and legs. Especially legs, since he has two of them. But the thing about Gober is that he takes these perfectly normal things and changes them so that you feel like you’re in a dream or Punk’d video (all to the dismay of his mother who would continually ask him, “Bobby, why would you want to make something like this?”). For instance, the sinks will have no nozzle, or be just flat against the wall rendering them useless. And the legs…well the legs have no body. They’ll just be sticking out of the wall on the floor like some sort of Wicked Witch of the West tribute. On a more serious note, Gober’s severed legs and sinks are also a reference to the AIDS epidemic in America. Gober himself wrote, “I was a gay man living in the epicenter of 20th century America’s worst health epidemic.” There was no way his art wouldn’t reflect such a dark time in his life.

And people seem to be into his strange sculptural antics. So much so that he represented the United States in the 2001 Venice Biennale and has had a bunch of solo exhibitions, including a 40-year retrospective titled, “Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor.” The art-critiquing god that is Jerry Saltz wrote about the retrospective, “Gober's work exhorts, annoys, lulls, lets boredom slip in. Yet it almost always radiates a disquieting radical strangeness and in its weird way heals. He is one of the best American artists of the last 30 years. This impressive exhibition more than does him justice.” You would never think that Saltz could love anything to the same extent that he hates Donald Trump (refer to his insta @jerrysaltz for proof) but alas, Gober has stolen his heart.