GREGORY COATES:  ACTUAL AND IMPLIED

Monica King Contemporary, 32 Lispenard Street, New York, NY

October 25 - December 7, 2019

Monica King Contemporary presents a solo exhibition by Pennsylvania-based artist Gregory Coates, Actual and Implied. The installation features over a dozen new mixed-media works composed of Coates’ signature found objects and post-minimalist assemblage. The exhibition’s title speaks to an overriding presence throughout the artist’s storied career: actual space versus the illusion of space, as well as the question of what is apparent and what is inferred.

In his recent body of work, initiated in 2016 and entitled the Cornrows series, Coates creates a visual dialogue between heightened texture, minimalist form, and a judicious use of color. The artist has dedicated the series to his grandmother, Beatrice Coates, who was a domestic worker. The exceptionally tactile compositions are constructed from collections of common scrub brushes coated with organic materials such as mud and often tinged a subtle, but captivating, orange color through the application of a rusting agent.  Other brushes are enlivened with the artist’s characteristically bold palette creating a strong tension between the banal and the sublime.  Coates’s idea of utilizing the deck brush as an artistic medium was inspired by the infamous incident of Joseph Beuys’ bathtub work being scrubbed clean by a cleaning lady. For Coates, the brushes exemplify the dichotomy between high art and everyday life.

The body of work also alludes to the representation of the pattern and texture of a traditional African hairstyle. As a student at a private Catholic school, Coates was often chided for wearing his hair in cornrows. This specific experience of being treated as “Other” has informed Coates’ exploration of the correlation between the policing of Black aesthetics, civil liberties, and the problematic history of domestic labor.

The exhibition also includes works from Coates’ new Fetish series, featuring found handbags transformed through earth elements of feathers, mud, and straw. Inspired by the artist’s mother, wife, and six sisters, the Fetish works reflect on the artist’s lifetime recognition of the special or magical space that is a women’s handbag, and his alignment of these objects to African Ritual Sculpture in carrying almost magical power out into the open.    

Installation images by Justine Hill