Theaster Gates: Heavy Sketches

Theaster Gates: Heavy Sketches September 30 - November 20, 2016 Reception for the Artist • October 6, 5 - 8pm Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce the reception for Heavy Sketches, an exhibition of new bronze and mixed material sculptures by Theaster Gates. Gates, the Chicago-based artist internationally renowned for his cross-disciplinary blend of social practice, performance, institution building, painting and sculpting, embarks on a new body of work with Heavy Sketches. The bronze sculptures here summon their inspiration from ritual masks originating with Ogoni, Dan, Baule, Bamana, and other Western African cultures, transformed through Gates’s varyingly expressionistic rendering in clay and subsequent casting in bronze. The source objects, sacred tools for accessing truth and knowledge on a cosmological level, provide Gates an opportunity to continue his practice-spanning interrogation into questions of power and access, cultural heritage and historical burdens, and the intertwining of ascetics with aesthetics. http://www.richardgraygallery.com/exhibitions/theaster-gates