Freedom of
Assembly
April 29 – July 5, 2015
144 – 152 Bermondsey
Street
South
Galleries and 9 x 9 x 9
London, UK
From
whitecube.com:
White Cube
is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Theaster Gates. Gates’
practice is wide-ranging and polysemous, attempting to bridge the gap between
art and life and catalyst social and economic change through direct artistic
agency. For this exhibition, entitled Freedom
of Assembly, Gates explores the theme of assembly in its widest sense,
enmeshing ideas of an autonomous art object with notions of individual freedom
and the empowerment of place. In particular, Gates refers to the First
Amendment of the United States Constitution, which protects freedom of speech,
the right to peaceably assemble, and the free exercise of religion.
Freedom of Assembly includes several new
series of sculptures, a large-scale presentation of tar paintings and a body of
work that foregrounds, for the first time, Gates’ long-term involvement with
clay production. Notions of assembly become evident in works that draw on
personal memory, politics, and the history and resonance of material objects
within our culture.
These
themes are syncopated in works that transform materials culled from disused
buildings in the artist’s own neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago. A
series of wooden vitrines combine various elements obtained from a closed-down
hardware store – a cornerstone of the community that ceased trading in the face
of conglomerate competition – alongside lamps, pots, glass and sculptural
objects. These colorful visual assemblages attempt to transmute the presence of
a place and site now disbanded, while exuding a sense of loss and reduction. In
Ground Rules (2015), Gates invokes
the narrative of art through his interrogation of painting, and, in particular,
the history of modernist abstraction. These works transform strips of a wooden
gym-floor into delicate, minimal compositions. Like his earlier Civil Rights Tapestries which repurposed
old fire hose into pastel-hued fabric works, these sculptures reignite the
significance and poetry of found materials through a process of reassembly and
re-composition.
Personal
and political themes are explored in a new series of large-scale tar paintings,
where rubber and tar is applied to wood panels creating monochrome, textural
compositions. In these works, Gates makes his decisions based on the procedure
of roofing, not painting, a process the artist describes as: ‘borrowing good
roofing strategies, through formal engagement with it, to arrive at painting or
at least to get to the essence of roofing’. With their thick impasto and shiny
reflective surface, the tar creates a surface that visibly reflects the
movement of the hand across the canvas, linking these works to Japanese
calligraphy as well as to a history of gestural abstraction. In other works,
sections of flat roofing are displayed like shaped two-dimensional canvases,
covered with delicate wooden feather-like tiles. Conceived as an index of roofs
– rather than as individual paintings – these works suggest a collective
presence and relate strongly to Gates’, whose father tarred roofs for a trade.
Gates
furthers these ideas in a collection of clay works that include a group of
small figures, stacks of ceramic bricks, and pots that combine clay with tar
and other materials from the roofing canon. In these poetic sculptures, Gates’
history with clay is married to his history with labor to create an inspired
new body of work.
Alongside
his presentation at White Cube Bermondsey, Theaster Gates will exhibit a new
body of work in the Arsenale at the 56th Venice Biennale from 9 May – 22
November 2015.
