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Kavi Gupta presents a solo exhibition surveying the career of acclaimed artist and perceptual engineer Willie Cole.
Cole’s aesthetic position has long been associated with upcycling: the creative reuse of materials that might otherwise be destined for the junkyard. He has made artworks out of old clothes irons, vintage shoes, plastic water bottles, and, most recently, musical instruments.
But there is much more to Cole’s art than implied by a perfunctory analysis of his materials. Unlike so many other objets trouvés artists of the present and the past, whose ideas relate more to simple accumulation, combination, or anti-art sentiment, Cole’s work possesses an underlying humanity that shows he is part of something more profound than aesthetic, or even ecological, trends.
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“I feel my work has spirit, I’m creating art the same way the universe does. I use multiples of single objects. I’m taking a single cell and multiplying it. I work an object to the point where I’m gonna get one beat away from the living thing, and the art tells me when it's there.” - Willie Cole
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Cole imbues these inanimate objects with a human presence. The work's resemblance to nineteenth and twentieth-century heads and masks from Cameroon is deliberate.
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"I want them to be links between worlds…. You live in the U.S. but here is a piece of art that looks like it is from another culture and another time, even though the materials in the work are strictly American."- Willie Cole
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Cole’s use of old clothes irons connects to the various forms of energy associated with this common consumer product. Irons transfer heat energy to a surface in order to eliminate wrinkles. The energy instigates beauty, but if applied too long in one spot, the energy becomes an instrument of destruction, scorching and corrupting something it was supposed to make perfect.
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Willie ColeUntitled (You steam out wrinkles as you iron!), 1989Metal iron, colored and xeroxed paper in wood and glass frame16 x 12 3/4 x 3 1/2 in
40.6 x 32.4 x 8.9 cm -
Willie ColeUntitled (you iron with that professional touch) ), 1989Metal iron, colored and xeroxed paper in wood and glass frame16 x 12 3/4 x 3 3/8 in
40.6 x 32.4 x 8.5 cm
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Recalling one of the earliest inspirations behind his desire to use multiples to instigate such novel connections between his art and the people who view it, Cole talks about the painter Georges Seurat. Seurat is credited with the invention of pointillism, a visual position in which tiny dots of color are placed next to each other to give the illusion of solid forms.Seurat was inspired by nature. We live in a world of particles; even though we see solids, it’s an illusion. Where Seurat used multiples of a single dot of paint to achieve his effects, Cole uses multiples of a single object.Like Seurat, Cole’s intention is to create new ways for people to see.
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“Seurat was a perceptual engineer, That’s also what I call myself." -Willie Cole
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Recent exhibitions of Cole's work include To Reclaim, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; New Concepts in Printmaking 2: Willie Cole, MoMA, New York, NY, USA; Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Chicago, Surrealism: The Conjured Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA; and Afro: Black Identity in America and Brazil, Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA. Cole’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; MoMA, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Wake Forest University Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and many others.
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Willie Cole: The B-Sides: 1989-2022
Past viewing_room
