PRESENTATION: Charles Gaines

A pivotal figure in conceptual art, Charles Gaines’ body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create a series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: PhxArt Archive

Born in 1944 in Charleston, South Carolina, Gaines began his career as a painter, earning his M.F.A. from the School of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1967. In the 1970s, Gaines’s art shifted dramatically in response to what he would later call ‘the awakening.’ Gaines’s epiphany materialized in a series called “Regression” (1973-74), in which he explored the use of mathematical and numeric systems to create soft, numbered marks in ink on a grid, with each drawing built upon the calculations of the last. This methodical approach would carry the artist into the subsequent decades of his artistic journey. Working both within the system and against it, Gaines points to the tensions between the empirical objective and the viewers’ subjective response. The concept of identity politics has played a central role within Gaines’s oeuvre, and the radical approach he employs addresses issues of race in ways that transcend the limits of representation. Two exhibitions by Charles Gaines are on show at Phoenix Art Museum, a major survey of the artist’s career entitled “Charles Gaines: 1992-2023”  and “Charles Gaines: Numbers and Trees: Arizona Trees 1” that marks the first complete public display of Gaines’ most recent body of work, “Charles Gaines: 1992-2023” features a selection of works from series that Gaines has worked on since 1992, when his practice underwent a pivotal shift, and he began to replace non-descript images with critical theory frameworks, ranging from the writings of Franz Kafka and Frantz Fanon to the manifestos of the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement. Utilizing these texts, Gaines channels decolonial discourse into complex formal and conceptual works.  Artworks featured in the survey include “Greenhouse” (2003–2023), a massive 12 x 16-foot sculptural enclosure that contains three stainless steel trees at the center. These trees become enveloped with smoke as adjacent monitors track historical and real-time temperature patterns of global warming. The work represents a poignant meditation on the global climate crisis that has persisted from the 18th century to the present. The exhibition also features the sculptural installation “Falling Rock” (2000–2023), in which a 65-lb piece of granite drops at randomized intervals either striking or falling just short of a sheet of glass. Viewers are left in suspense of the work’s outcome and whether (or when) the glass will shatter. Charles Gaines is widely known for converting images and text-based documents into numerical structures, musical notations, and other sign systems through rigorous translation mechanisms. Since the 1970s, he has drawn inspiration from various forms including the imagery of trees, spanning from California walnuts and palms to southern pecans. In his newest tree series, “Numbers and Trees: Arizona Series 1” (2023) the artist focuses on the Arizona cottonwood. Using his signature gridding and layer techniques, Gaines produced eight large-scale triptychs depicting cottonwoods that were photographed along the San Pedro River outside Sierra Vista, AZ. The trees were then plotted with specific colors and a numbered grid reflecting the full form before sequentially overlaying the trees. Each work’s title references rivers, creeks, washes, and arroyos of Utah and Arizona, where cottonwoods are most often found growing near significant bodies of water. With this exhibition of Gaines’ newest work centered on the Arizona cottonwood, we can explore the artist’s ongoing investigation of this powerful imagery in a local context. The artist’s systems, which highlight the differences between these trees, induce the viewer to assign a meaning to these differences—a meaning that is arbitrarily determined because the differences themselves are arbitrary. These works thereby call attention to our tendency to impose categories based on subjective values and suggest the arbitrary nature of other manufactured systems in our society. Trees have been a central motif in Gaines’s distinguished practice since he first began his “Walnut Tree Orchard” series in the 1970s. His methodical examination of their forms continues in this latest series, as the artist plots each cottonwood tree by assigning it a specific color and a numbered grid that reflects the full form of the tree. For each successive work, Gaines overlays the forms of trees one at a time and in progression, following his systematic sequencing process. These exhibitions simultaneously demonstrate Gaines’ enduring aesthetic commitment to demystifying systems of representation as well as his ongoing and indispensable contributions to the field of conceptual art.

Photo: Charles Gaines, Greenhouse, 2003-2023.Wood, metal, UV printed polycarbonate, stainless steel, electronics, polyester, software, monitors, lights. Unique. Installation dimensions variable. © Charles Gaines. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Zachary Balber

Info: “Charles Gaines: Numbers and Trees: Arizona Series 1”,  Curator: Olga Viso, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt), 1625 North Central Ave., Phoenix, AZ, USA, Duration: 30/10/2024-20/7/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 10:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00 & “Charles Gaines: 1992-2023”: Curator: Gean Moreno, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt), 1625 North Central Ave., Phoenix, AZ, USA, Duration: 30/10/2024-9/3/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 10:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://phxart.org/