Charles Gaines was born in 1944 in Charleston, South Carolina, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Over the last 40 years, Gaines has made work that radically questions the relationships between aesthetic experience, political beliefs, and the formation of meaning. He employs systems and rule-based procedures to produce his work and explore how we experience and derive meaning from art. Informed by sources as varied as Tantric Buddhist drawings, the systemized work of Hanne Darboven, and John Cage’s notions of indeterminacy, Gaines often employs plotting and mathematics to organize the visual components of his work.
Gaines has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout his career, most recently at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2014), Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2013), Pomona College Museum of Art and Pitzer Art Galleries, Pomona and Claremont, California (2012), the Venice Biennale (2007), REDCAT, Los Angeles (2006), Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria (2006), and the Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute (2001). Recently, he has shown in group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014 and 2011), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013 and 2011), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2012), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011), the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2011), and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2009).
