This magnificent new survey looks at Theaster’s complex investigations into the material and spiritual legacies of clay, while exploring the role the medium has played in craft, labour, community building, racial identity, colonialism and global trade. ‘As a potter you start to learn how to shape the world,’ Gates once declared.
Pottery, sculpture, film and research material spanning the artist’s two-decade career are shown alongside a selection of intriguing historic ceramics from private and public collections, including the V&A. The star of the show is without a doubt A Clay Sermon (2021), a beautifully shot video, which includes archival imagery, gospel music, improvised jazz and footage of the artist sitting at a potter’s wheel in a derelict factory in Montana.
Upstairs, you’ll find brilliant ceramic pieces created by Gates that fuse personal references with African American cultural emblems, among them his large, tarred vessels installed on custom-made plinths of hand-milled wood and stone.
‘Clay has been foundational to Theaster’s intertwined artistic and social practices,’ says chief curator Lydia Lee. ‘This show explores his affinities with potters internationally and the relationships among his various studio, social engagement and urban regeneration projects.’ Add to your autumn to-do list now.
Hailed as one of the greatest shows of the year, Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty shines a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts, including works never shown before in the UK. Bringing together 30 works spanning over 30 years, it explores Frankenthaler’s revolutionary approach to the woodcut, positioning her as one of the medium’s greatest innovators.
Like her abstract painterly compositions, Frankenthaler’s woodcuts boast expanses of luminous colour and fluid forms as well as a spontaneity rarely associated with the medium. Standout works include the artist’s first woodcut East and Beyond (1973) and Madame Butterfly (2000), a monumental triptych created in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata that shows Frankenthaler at her most expressive and experimental. Also featured in the show are all six woodcuts of the sequence Tales of Genji (1998), for which Frankenthaler employed her signature soak-stain technique.
‘There is something magical about how she breathes life into such a rigid medium, retaining the energy and dynamism — that born at once feeling — that you see in her painting,’ says exhibition curator Jane Findlay. ‘And with her proofs and process explored alongside we’ll show the painstaking work behind these beguiling works — revealing just how accomplished Frankenthaler was in modulating control and spontaneity in her art.’
