Charles Gaines

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Charles Gaines
Image Not Available for Charles Gaines

Charles Gaines

American, born 1944
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BiographyCharles Gaines was born in Charleston, and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He earned his MFA in 1967 from the Rochester Institute of Technology. In the 1970s, Gaines began to explore the use of mathematical systems to create soft, numbered marks on a grid, layering one drawing on top of another, work that was formative to the field of Conceptual Art. Using a variety of media, Gaines continues to explore methodical approaches to art making. He is a professor at the California Institute of the Arts, where his teaching has been influential for generations of artists. His 2017 retrospective Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989 was organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem.

“The ego is limiting; we gravitate toward things we know and can’t imagine things we don’t know. Through ‘systems’ I could go where the imagination couldn’t and bring things that otherwise would not be thought about to light. . . . I surmised that my interest in abstract ideas and concepts was part of my temperament, but that it was also nurtured by my experience growing up as a black kid in the Jim Crow South. . . . Transformation was my poetic response to escaping racism.”
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