Text by David Platzker. Interview by Cherise Smith.
New work by pioneering conceptualist Charles Gaines, translating Southern California’s palm trees into his signature luminous grid
Featuring a group of new works in the Numbers and Trees series by Los Angeles artist Charles Gaines (born 1944), this volume extends Gaines’ decades-long Gridworks project with images of palm trees from the California desert translated into Gaines’ signature luminous numbered grid.
A pivotal figure in the history of conceptual art, Gaines has long employed rigorous, rule-based processes to create works in a variety of mediums that interrogate the relationship between objects and their representations. On his commitment to using strict systems to generate new forms, Gaines has said: “The system has never changed, but the outcome is always different.”
The book features an essay by curator David Platzker and an interview by art historian Cherise Smith delving into earlier series within Gaines’s oeuvre, positioning this new work in dialogue with the artist’s paintings.
Detail from 'Charles Gaines: Palm Trees and Other Works.'
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Featured spread, reproducing details of a 2019 work by west coast conceptualist Charles Gaines, is from Palm Trees and Other Works, published by Hauser & Wirth. Featuring new and historical works (including a wealth of gorgeous, close details) plus text by David Platzker and an interview by Cherise Smith, this is the most up-to-date monograph on the artist currently in print. "Whether a tree is a walnut or a palm, the basic structure of its DNA tells it how to form according to its species," Platzker writes. "Over its lifetime, forces act on and transform it—the constraints of the ground it stands on, its access to nutrients and sunlight, its vulnerability to wind and pests, its responses to other natural and human activities. Humans are similar: we too are subject to forces both natural and imposed on us through circumstances of upbringing, class, education, nationality, gender, orientation, and, what is most apparent to other humans, the color of our skin. In time we acquire physical and emotional scars that further make us unique individuals. Gaines's trees ask us to recognize how the information presented in them amalgamates—to acknowledge how they layer together. Graphing living matter, they speak not only to organic objects' own transformation and diversification but also to what happens to them in time." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8 x 12 in. / 144 pgs / 85 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $69.95 ISBN: 9783906915463 PUBLISHER: Hauser & Wirth Publishers AVAILABLE: 2/18/2020 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA ASIA AU/NZ AFR ME
Published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Text by David Platzker. Interview by Cherise Smith.
New work by pioneering conceptualist Charles Gaines, translating Southern California’s palm trees into his signature luminous grid
Featuring a group of new works in the Numbers and Trees series by Los Angeles artist Charles Gaines (born 1944), this volume extends Gaines’ decades-long Gridworks project with images of palm trees from the California desert translated into Gaines’ signature luminous numbered grid.
A pivotal figure in the history of conceptual art, Gaines has long employed rigorous, rule-based processes to create works in a variety of mediums that interrogate the relationship between objects and their representations. On his commitment to using strict systems to generate new forms, Gaines has said: “The system has never changed, but the outcome is always different.”
The book features an essay by curator David Platzker and an interview by art historian Cherise Smith delving into earlier series within Gaines’s oeuvre, positioning this new work in dialogue with the artist’s paintings.
