THEASTER GATES
I always find myself returning to the vessel. It is part of the intellectual life force of my practice and it precedes all other forms of making. - Theaster Gates
Gagosian is pleased to presentf Black Vessel, Theaster Gates’s first-ever solo exhibition in New York.
Gates’s oeuvre is among the most conceptually and materially rich in contemporary art, anchored equally in the canons of art history, the racial ideology of the Black diaspora, and the artist’s own personal history. Through an art practice predicated on cultural reclamation and social empowerment, Gates exchanges and recharges objects and ideas, proposing the artwork as a communicating vessel or sacred reliquary of recollected histories, critical vitality, and shared experience. Traversing a broad range of formal approaches such as painting, sculpture, sound, and performance, as well as the processes of salvaging, archiving, and place making, he delivers penetrating social commentary on labor, material, spiritual capital, and commodity within a close examination of the urban condition.
In 2012 Gates began to formalize his knowledge of roofing techniques into a new territory of experimental painting, working with tar to make the invisible roof legible. In a new suite of paintings completed this year, Gates has intensified his approach, crafting painted torch down into taut conjoined backdrops for the interplay of archaeological tarred fragments. Just as postwar artists set themselves apart from gestural abstraction by utilizing mass-produced industrial materials and techniques in place of paint and canvas, Gates has imbued abstract painting with unprecedented form and meaning—first with thef Civil Tapestriesf (2011–), which charged Minimalist language with the legacies of racial injustice; and now in ruggedly elegant works that employ the signifying materials and skilled labor of roofing to invoke a poignant meditation on urban spirit and its implicit obsolescence.
Walking Prayer (2018–20) serve as precious intellectual reliquaries whereby Black knowledge is restored and reconstituted as monuments to the truth of the Black archive and the importance of Black identity in the pursuit of world knowledge. Forf Walking Prayer, Gates utilized a wide-ranging historical collection of published books on Black experience, rebinding them in black and embossing the spines with language to constitute one long poem or performative score that moves among many modes of address—inchoate, enunciative, interrogatory. Arranged in an original cast-iron Carnegie open-access library shelving unit, a modular design that helped revolutionize modern libraries, Walking Prayer invites the viewer to engage in Gates’s poetic invocation where reading becomes a processional act and the gallery transforms into a latent warehouse of emotional and spiritual devices. A single Leslie speaker amplifies a single chord from a Hammond B3 organ—a pairing synonymous with Black church gospel and jazz—in a minimal sound loop, building to a crescendo to further sacralize the space.