Jeffrey Gibson was born in 1972 in Colorado Springs and is based in Germantown, New York. He creates a visual language that fuses text, high colour, rich pattern and diverse materiality to evoke joy, exuberance, critique and resistance. He is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent and integrates Indigenous languages and histories with queer aesthetics, ancient through contemporary visual culture, popular music and literature. His practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, installation and video and deliberately challenges art-world orthodoxies, questions biases about taste and legitimacy, subverts Indigenous stereotypes, and emphasizes craft, collage, colour and artists such as Matisse, Abakanowicz, Frank Bowling and David Hammons. His work has been shown at the United States Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Hauser & Wirth and MASS MoCA.
His works range from painting, in which he trained, to myriad sculptural forms, performances and installations and video. With this interdisciplinary practice, he deliberately confronts orthodoxies in the art world and art history, questioning biases regarding taste, value and legitimacy, confronting and subverting stereotypes of Indigenous people and culture, and proposing a radical interaction with the objects and spaces he creates.
He reflects on his work's overarching collage aesthetic, the deliberate confrontation in his work with decorative and craft traditions, and the role of colour in his work generally and in his new works for an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Paris. He discusses the early impact of Henri Matisse, his love of Magdalena Abakanowicz's textile sculptures, the importance to him of Frank Bowling and David Hammons.
Collection
[
|
...
]