Charles Gaines – Ciphering African Acacias and Supreme Court Decisions

HAUSER & WIRTH Paris, 26 bis rue François 1er, 75008, Paris

10 de junio de 2026 – 26 de septiembre de 2026

For over five decades, pioneering conceptual artist Charles Gaines has used systems to create series of works that mine the complex relationship between perception and meaning. For his first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth's Paris gallery, Gaines debuts new Plexiglas works from his Numbers and Trees series, first conceived in 1986. Focusing on acacia trees from photographs shot during a 2023 trip to Tanzania, the nine compositions examine similarity and difference through a rigorous gridded system. Gaines also debuts Manifestos 7, an immersive audiovisual installation pairing musical composition with video of scrolling Supreme Court rulings from Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, alongside five drawings illustrating his score. By translating legal text into musical notes, Gaines unites rational mathematical structures with the irrationality of racial injustice, pointing to the disjunction between empirical objectivity and subjective response.