Description

This book examines the artist’s first foray into the use of bronze as a sculptural material. Theaster Gates (born 1973) , the Chicago-based artist internationally renowned for his cross-disciplinary blend of social practice, performance, institution building, painting and sculpting, embarks on a new body of work with Heavy Sketches . The bronze sculptures here summon their inspiration from ritual masks originating with Ogoni, Dan, Baule, Bamana, and other Western African cultures, transformed through Gates’s varyingly expressionistic rendering in clay and subsequent casting in bronze. The subject of the works is what the artist calls “practices concerned with the eternal.” These masks furthermore evoke a history of cultural appropriation including, significantly, the important role West African masks played in the development of twentieth century European modernism. ...”