The artworks on 20×20 cm canvas were conceived as small windows into language. Since the exhibition at Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton in 2009, the series “Save the Poetry” was born. Both the idea of lost languages and the concept of iconic words are part of this collection, which has gained international attention with exhibitions at Northwestern University in Chicago, Smac Gallery in Cape Town, and Quiroz 108 Gallery in Miami. In the three presented works, the visual system changes, the artwork becomes more material, and the word becomes iconic and ironic: Love Hate Boh<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1610,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"Gates\u2019s oeuvre is among the most conceptually and materially rich in contemporary art, anchored equally in the canons of art history, the racial ideology of the Black diaspora, and the artist\u2019s own personal history. Through an art practice predicated on cultural reclamation and social empowerment, Gates exchanges and recharges objects and ideas, proposing the artwork as a communicating vessel or sacred reliquary of recollected histories, critical vitality, and shared experience. Traversing a broad range of formal approaches such as painting, sculpture, sound, and performance, as well as the processes of salvaging, archiving, and place making, he delivers penetrating social commentary on labor, material, spiritual capital, and commodity within a close examination of the urban condition. The Brick Reliquaries (2020) are Gates\u2019s latest sculptural experiments. By firing bricks with a strong manganese content to an excessive 2300\u00b0F, the known properties of the materials are transformed into the mysteries of heat-based sculpture. In some instances, the material loses its specificity when pushed to such limits; in others, the carbide shelves inside the kiln fuse with the bricks and other sculptural elements that rest on them, becoming host to material transformation.","_et_gb_content_width":""},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[58],"product_tag":[321,250,320],"class_list":["post-5739","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-pittura-en","product_tag-rel-1-en","product_tag-rotelli-en","product_tag-trittico-en","first","instock","taxable","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n