Gregory Coates “Actual And Implied”

Monica King Conteporary

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Monica King Contemporary presents a solo exhibition by Pennsylvania-based artist Gregory Coates, Actual and Implied.

Actual and Implied features over a dozen recently completed mixed-media works composed of Coates’ signature found objects and post-minimalist assemblage. The exhibition 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.

The artist’s masterful interplay between form, color, and texture is relayed in a new body of work entitled Cornrows Series, dedicated to his grandmother, Beatrice Coates. Collections of scrub brushes with bristles caked with mud, soil, and rusting agents speak to the artist’s personal chastisement for his cornrows as a Catholic schoolboy, and as a result, his consideration of correlations between Black aesthetics and his grandmother’s position as a domestic worker—a striking commentary about civil liberties and histories of labor.

The exhibition also includes works from Coates’ new Fetish series, found handbags transformed through the earth elements of feathers, mud, and straw. Inspired by the artist’s female family members, the works reflect on the magical space of a woman’s handbag and the alignment of these objects to African Ritual Sculpture.