- Venue
- White Cube Bermondsey
- Location
Theaster Gates’ first solo exhibition in London is filled with a series of unequivocally imposing artistic gestures: a bright yellow 1960’s fire truck parked by the gallery’s entrance, an entire wall of the venue’s tallest room filled with a comprehensive library of books associated with black history, and a large tar kettle filled with dried, but still pungent, roofing tar. All of which leads to the arresting centrepiece situated at the end of the exhibition, Raising Goliath. This consists of a second fire truck suspended at one end of a pulley system, with a large black metal container tightly packed with journals on black culture supposedly counter balancing its weight at the other end.
References to the African-American civil rights movement saturate Gates’ artwork, and this exhibition is no exception. Some of these references stem from the experiences of his family who lived in Chicago at a time when it was a flashpoint for civil rights related violence. His father, for example, used the tar kettle when tarring roofs, a profession predominantly confined to the city’s ghettoised black community. In contrast, other references are sourced from the broader historical narrative, such as the library of books, from the archive of Johnson Publishing Company, which produced the iconic black culture magazine Ebony. The relevance of these references is sometimes axiomatic, sometimes ambiguous enough to facilitate further research by the viewer, and sometimes clearly elaborated on by the documentaries screened concurrently with the exhibition.
While the scale and boldness of these artworks makes them both memorable and well-suited to the vastness of the White Cube’s Bermondsey venue, the wall based works exhibited alongside them contain the same potency but without the grandiosity. These wall based works, of which there are three distinct permutations, use neither paint nor canvas, yet are evocative of the work of the abstract painters of late modernism. The Roofing Exercise series consist of roughhewn roofing fabric bolted to large wooden boards that have then been brushed with thick swathes of roofing tar, their pure black surfaces evoke the monochromes of Ad Reinhardt while the drips of viscous tar suggest Pollock’s signature style. The work in the Gees series are made up of rectangular frames of tightly bunched, vertical strips of fire engine hosepipe of varying tones of washed out red and blue, suggestive of Daniel Buren. These works reimagine this historical body of abstraction, utilising the loaded materials that run through Gates’ recent practice, and through this, they seem to poke at the predominantly white male tradition of abstract painting. Due to this, they are able to hold their own, even when juxtaposed with the exhibition’s more overbearing elements.
