Theaster Gates
b. 1973, United States
Color Study for Nature Painting, 2020
Industrial oil-based enamel, rubber torch down, bitumen, wood and copper
127.6 x 184.2 x 14.0 cm
Color Study for Nature Painting is One of Theaster Gates’ tar paintings, which are created using materials commonly found in roofing, reflecting his father’s occupation as a roofer. The dimensionality created by the layering of materials highlights this painting’s sculptural aspect, of which Gates states, “Roofing, and by proxy, painting, has become core to my practice.” These everyday construction materials are used to create forms that reference Modernist abstract traditions. By doing so, Gates elevates their value beyond the practical while extending and challenging the hegemonic tensions underlying this art history canon to include overlooked perspectives of the Black community. Particularly, Gates encourages viewers to perceive Black labour as a kind of artistic labour, as viewers are prompted to consider the socio-economic disparities between Black people and their white counterparts that made it difficult for Black narratives to be sufficiently represented in the art historical canon.
Theaster Gates (b. 1973) is an American artist whose works cover a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, performance intervention, urban intervention, and land development. Trained as a sculptor and urban planner, Gates’ practice relates to space as a means of community building by catalysing social engagement and responds to the lack of formal documentation in remembering Black cultural forms, particularly in dominant cultural narratives. Gates often works with materials that have a significant cultural history to repurpose them as linguistic codes that piece together his critiques of modernist art historical tropes. Currently a professor of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, Gates has received the Isamu Noguchi Award (2023), Friedrich Kiesler Prize for Architecture and Art (2021), and the World Economic Forum Crystal Award (2020). Gates’s works have also been exhibited globally in various exhibitions such as the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2024), Serpentine Pavilion, London (2022), and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019).
