Theaster Gates, Black Vessel

About

Gagosian is pleased to present 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 and the racial ideology of the Black diaspora. Through an art practice predicated on cultural reclamation and social empowerment, Gates exchanges and recharges objects and ideas, creating a cyclical ecosystem of renewal. Traversing a broad range of media, from painting, sculpture, sound, and performance to the processes of salvaging, archiving, and space making, he delivers penetrating social commentary on labor, material, spiritual capital, and commodity, within a close examination of the urban condition.

With potent synergies of material and meaning, Gates promotes the vessel as a container of the concrete, the symbolic, and the spiritual—a metaphor for embodied existence and a means by which to gather communities together in time and space. For Gates, who trained as a potter, the ceramic vessel is a universal object of ritual significance. In a new series of unique large-scale works in glazed and fired clay, he unites ancient traditions with modernist aesthetics, drawing elective affinities between Eastern, Western, and African techne.