Exhibition Review: Charles Gaines: Southern Trees

© Charles Gaines. Numbers and Trees: Charleston Series 1, Tree #8, Sage Way, 2022. Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, lacquer, wood, 3 parts. Overall: 241.3 x 337.8 x 14.6 cm / 95 x 133 x 5 3/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Written by Sophie Mulgrew

Photo Edited by Haley Winchell

Charles Gaines’s Southern Trees at Hauser & Wirth is a culminating example of the artist’s recent work and creative thesis. After earning his MFA from the School of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1967, Gaines’s creative work underwent a dramatic shift in both method and intent. This change — which Gaines would later call his “great awakening” — resulted in the formation of his hallmark style in which living objects are juxtaposed with pixelated versions of their image.

© Charles Gaines. Pecan Trees: Set 5, 2022. Photograph, watercolor, ink on paper, 3 sheets Overall: 70.8 x 187 x 5.1 cm / 27 7/8 x 73 5/8 x 2 in. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

© Charles Gaines. Pecan Trees: Set 5 (Detail), 2022. Photograph, watercolor, ink on paper, 3 sheets Overall: 70.8 x 187 x 5.1 cm / 27 7/8 x 73 5/8 x 2 in. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Southern Trees takes up two floors of the Hauser & Wirth Gallery. The first displays Gaines’s Pecan Trees; a collection of 5 different triptychs depicting the progressive distillation of photographs into pixel plots. Each triptych begins with a photograph of a tree, which is then reduced to merely its outline, and finally rendered in colorful pixels on a gridded canvas. In breaking down the steps of this process as individual pieces, Gaines illustrates how systems and processes of categorization fail to accurately capture their subjects. He highlights the arbitrary nature of the formulas with which we try to make sense of the world.

The second floor of the exhibition contains Gaines’s Numbers and Trees series. In these pieces, Gaines overlays zoomed in images of trees on top of their pixelated forms. In doing so, he draws the discrepancy between living things and their formulaic distillations into even greater relief. In the foreground of the works, the trees are dynamic and bold; they stretch across and beyond the bounds of their canvases. In the background, they fit neatly into stagnant plotted squares. Gaines uses his work around trees to provoke bigger questions about race and identity in the context of American systems. He hopes the viewer will consider what is left unrepresented when living things are contextualized only by arbitrary stems of categorization.

© Charles Gaines. Numbers and Trees: Charleston Series 1, Tree #5, Tranquil Drive, 2022. Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, lacquer, wood. 152.4 x 210.5 x 14.6 cm / 60 x 82 7/8 x 5 3/4 in. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

© Charles Gaines. Numbers and Trees: Charleston Series 1, Tree #5, Tranquil Drive (Detail), 2022. Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, lacquer, wood. 152.4 x 210.5 x 14.6 cm / 60 x 82 7/8 x 5 3/4 in. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

© Charles Gaines. Numbers and Trees: Charleston Series 1, Tree #1, Old Towne Road, 2022. Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, lacquer, wood. 152.4 x 210.5 x 14.6 cm / 60 x 82 7/8 x 5 3/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

© Charles Gaines. Numbers and Trees: Charleston Series 1, Tree #1, Old Towne Road (Detail), 2022. Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, lacquer, wood. 152.4 x 210.5 x 14.6 cm / 60 x 82 7/8 x 5 3/4 in. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Gaines is also interested in deconstructing the relationship between art and its audience. In his lecture at the gallery, he stated that “the main critique [he’s] interested in is the critique of subjectivity.” For Gaines, this manifests in the use of the grid plots and their uniform method of formation which he believes “protects the subjectivity of the artist” by eliminating their choices from the work. The viewer must consider their own perspective on the image and its variations, rather than how or why the artist rendered it in this particular manner. Gaines says he believes the works’ “most important purpose is giving access to the imagination.” He makes the viewer and their mind active participants in the formation of the art.

Gaines is best known as an artist, but his life work extends far beyond what happens in his studio. Gaines taught for many years at CalArts school of art where he established a fellowship for Black students in the M.F.A Art program to receive scholarship aid. In addition to his artwork he has published multiple essays on contemporary art, and remains an engaged and progressive thinker in the field. Southern Trees illustrates the complexity of Gaines background and practice, and asserts his place as a leading figure in the world of contemporary Conceptual art.

© Charles Gaines. Pecan Trees: Set 3, 2022. Photograph, watercolor, ink on paper, 3 sheets Overall: 70.8 x 187 x 5.1 cm / 27 7/8 x 73 5/8 x 2 in. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.