This post was originally published on artnews.com
Hauser & Wirth will now represent Jeffrey Gibson, who this year did the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, marking the first time an Indigenous artist received that honor solo.
Related Articles
Gibson will have his first solo show with Hauser & Wirth in Paris in October 2025. Ahead of that, the gallery will present a new work by the artist at its Art Basel Paris booth later this month.
Hauser & Wirth will represent Gibson in collaboration with New York–based gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co. The representation deal means that Gibson will no longer work with Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, as well as Chicago’s Kavi Gupta Gallery, with whom he had previously severed ties. (In 2023, Gibson filed a lawsuit against Kavi Gupta Gallery, alleging that it had withheld more than $600,000 owed to him.)
Gibson, who is based in Hudson, New York, is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and is also of Cherokee descent. He is best-known for his vibrant use of color in eye-catching paintings and his weighty, beaded punching bags. These works typically incorporate poetic words of phrases in blocky letters.
Across his practice, which also includes sculpture, installation, video, and performance, Gibson thinks through various histories—American, Indigenous, queer—and marries them with various facets of pop culture and art history.
In his art is a real concern for the specific materials that he employs, and oftentimes he uses different techniques that draw from Indigenous art traditions, including beadwork, basket making, animal hides, abstraction, and more. “My goal was never to recreate what was made previously. I didn’t want to learn how to make baskets—I wanted to learn the technology of making a basket, so that I could then make sculpture,” he told Art in America earlier this year.
In recent years, Gibson’s art has been exhibited widely. In the past few years, he has had exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, the Sainsbury Centre in the UK, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, and the Portland Art Museum. (The latter two museums jointly presented Gibson’s US Pavilion.) In November, he will open a solo exhibition at MASS MoCA, and next fall, he will debut a façade commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2019.
“We are thrilled to welcome Jeffrey Gibson to Hauser & Wirth and honored to be entrusted by the artist to advocate for a vision and oeuvre we admire so deeply,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement. “Jeffrey occupies a unique position in the sweep of contemporary art, as both an astute cultural critic and a virtuosic handler of form, color and the synthesis of many art historical languages in a range of mediums. Through his paintings, sculpture, public installations, performances and collaborations to advance learning, Jeffrey illuminates the most challenging and profound issues with wit and joy. He uses his art to generate an ongoing critique of American culture that is simultaneously fierce and loving, forceful and radiant—and ultimately incredibly generous in the way it includes us all.”