Theaster Gates: African Still Life
White Cube Seoul · 강남구
화이트큐브 서울
White Cube presents the first solo exhibition in South Korea of works by Theaster Gates (b. 1973, Chicago), whose expansive practice brings together sculpture, ceramics, architecture, land art, performance and music. Informed by his training in urban planning and Japanese, Korean, and Chinese ceramic traditions, he approaches material, space and craft as interconnected forms of cultural inquiry attentive to transformation, ritual and the social life of objects. ‘African Still Life’ explores the relationship between Gates’s ceramic and musical practices, using an expanded understanding of the conventions of still life as a shared point of departure. In the first gallery, a sculptural assemblage approaches the genre not simply as an arrangement of objects but as a means of articulating the influences that inform the artist’s aesthetic sensibility and his work more broadly. In Gates’s words, the African still life emerges from ‘a set of complicated conflations’ between his American culture and his engagement with African and Asian ritual traditions: ‘it is a way of acknowledging how those conflations […] live with me at home and in the studio’. In this way, it becomes ‘a kind of self-portrait’, reflecting the identity of the individual who selects and curates its materials.
White CubeWhite Cube Seoul화이트큐브Theaster GatesAfrican Still Life도산공원강남