Hauser & Wirth has announced the representation of acclaimed American artist Jeffrey Gibson, in collaboration with Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Over the past three decades, Gibson has evolved a rich interdisciplinary practice, drawing from American, Indigenous and queer histories, as well as references to popular music, literature and art historical narratives. Harnessing these sources to his own personal experiences, Gibson has created an astonishing array of works that explore questions of taste, authenticity and the limits of cultural legibility. His art spans the fullest range of mediums—from painting and sculpture to installation, video and performance—and a distinctive visual language that embraces a broad spectrum of cultural expressions and identities in a way that is simultaneously intimate and radically expansive.
Based in Hudson NY, Gibson is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent. In 2024, he was the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States in a solo presentation at the Venice Biennale. Raised in Europe, Asia and the United States, Gibson developed an interest in notions of cultural translations and the relationship between difference and desire. Remixing and redefining histories of struggle and freedom, his installations and performances especially cultivate shared social spaces of reflection and release.
Gibson’s work is characterized by his bold chromatic sensibility, emphasis on pattern and incorporation of text. His kaleidoscopic use of color is informed by histories of Indigenous geometric abstraction, Native American Regalia and Western formalist traditions. Trained as a painter, Gibson is driven by process; he frequently incorporates materials and techniques drawn from various traditions of making. Applying intricate beadwork, leatherwork and quilting to quotidian and vernacular objects, he combines cultural aesthetics and strategies of production into playful and evocative hybrid forms that resist easy categorization.
We are thrilled to welcome Jeffrey Gibson to Hauser & Wirth and honored to be entrusted by the artist to advocate for a vision and oeuvre we admire so deeply. Jeffrey occupies a unique position in the sweep of contemporary art, as both an astute cultural critic and a virtuosic handler of form, color and the synthesis of many art historical languages in a range of mediums. Through his paintings, sculpture, public installations, performances and collaborations to advance learning, Jeffrey illuminates the most challenging and profound issues with wit and joy. He uses his art to generate an ongoing critique of American culture that is simultaneously fierce and loving, forceful and radiant—and ultimately incredibly generous in the way it includes us all. His ideas and practice align with those of many artists in our program, from Mike Kelley to Frank Bowling, from Isa Genzken to Sophie Taeuber-Arp, as well as other greats like Bridget Riley and Katerina Grosse, whose art he cites as touchstones. We look forward to the collaboration ahead and are delighted to welcome Jeffrey to Hauser & Wirth.
Marc Payot, President at Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth will present a new work, ‘I will continue to change‘ (2024), by Gibson in the gallery’s stand at Art Basel Paris in October 2024. The artist’s upcoming solo projects include ‘POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT,’ a newly commissioned immersive installation that will occupy MASS MoCA’s signature Building 5 gallery in North Adams, Massachusetts, from November 2024. This collaborative and interactive exhibition offers an exploration into the term ‘two-spirit,’ a third gender that is both, and neither, male or female and often embraced by many Indigenous individuals and communities to encompass gender and spiritual identity.
From September 2025, Gibson will become the sixth artist commissioned to create outdoor works for the facade of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, developed from the ancestral spirit figures he started assembling in 2015. Gibson is currently an artist-in-residence at Bard College, NY.
About the artist
Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, CO; lives and works in New York) grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, and Korea, where he absorbed the transgressive soundtrack of the 1980s through limited access to MTV. Gibson graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and received a Master of Arts in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1998. While in Chicago he also worked as a research assistant on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) for the Field Museum, a formative experience that fostered an ongoing interest in questions of ownership and notions of cultural translation. Though trained as a painter, Gibson began incorporating materials and techniques that deliberately reference his heritage—such as raw hides and bead work—around 2010. A major turning point in his career, in 2012 he presented ‘one becomes the other,’ his first solo exhibition of sculpture and video, at Participant Inc. Sculpture, moving image, and sound have since become an integral aspect of his practice. He is known for his immersive, multi-sensory installations that invoke and interweave such disparate contexts as faith-based spaces of communion and night clubs.
Gibson is the recipient of many distinguished awards and honors, including honorary doctorates from Claremont Graduate University (2016) and the Institute of American Indian Arts (2023), as well a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2012), and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2019). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; Portland Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Gibson conceived and coedited the landmark volume ‘An Indigenous Present’ (2023), which showcases diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms, and media. The book will become an exhibition for the ICA Boston in October 2025.