THEASTER GATES: BLACK MYSTIC

Gagosian presents Black Mystic, an exhibition of new works by Theaster Gates at the Le Bourget gallery. Employing industrial roofing materials, Gates develops tar paintings or “torch works” into monumental tapestries that are installed in the expansive venue at Le Bourget.

April 13, 2024

Encapsulating the entirety of his tar practice, this body of work sees Gates further his ambitious experiments with drawing at the scale of a roof. He introduces a new chromatic range and compositional complexity, developing means of incorporating imagery and text into these works.

Concurrent with the exhibition at Le Bourget, Theaster Gates: Afro-Mingei will be at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, from April 24 through September 1, 2024. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Japan and his largest ever in Asia, Afro-Mingei centers on the cultural hybridity that informs Gates’s work, combining Black diasporic culture with Japanese craft traditions.

Made with roofing material of bitumen-infused polyester mats known as torch down, these complex, collage-like compositions of layered and juxtaposed color bear the marks of flame and tar used to bind them together. These transformative processes are charged with significance both as vital infrastructure that usually goes unnoticed and as the artist’s familial legacy.

Included in the exhibition at Le Bourget is the tar kettle that he inherited from his late father, a professional roofer. For Gates, working with tar is a means to produce art that engages with modernist abstraction as well as modes of craft and labor, while serving to commemorate his father.

For the first time, Gates incorporates words into his tar paintings, using large stencils to apply them and competing with the scale of billboards. “1-800 ROOFING” is a slogan that advertises a fictive company, reinforcing the artist’s conception of art as a collective endeavor.

In addition, he incorporates silkscreened imagery from the archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, the Chicago-based publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, which Gates has preserved in their entirety through his Rebuild Foundation. The silkscreened image of a singer signifies the central role of Black music and musicians in defining American culture.