White Dice now represents Cai Guo-Qiang, making the British powerhouse the primary gallery to symbolize the artist. The Chinese language-born, New York-based painter is extensively recognised for his gunpowder work. He had a solo present on the gallery’s Bermondsey area final autumn, Gunpowder and Abstraction 2015-2016, which was his first presentation in London since his large-scale undertaking at Tate Fashionable in 2003.
Cai’s new association with White Dice coincides with the gallery’s solo presentation of the artist’s ongoing gunpowder portray collection with birds, which he began in 2018, at Tefaf New York (14-19 Could). “Over the previous three many years, Cai has persistently redefined what artwork may be,” Capucine Perrot, the gallery’s director of artist and museum liaisons, tells The Artwork Newspaper. She provides that Cai has been on the gallery’s radar since its group visited his studio in Beijing 20 years in the past.
For Cai, the choice to group up with White Dice felt like a “pure development” and got here from a need to point out his work in a business gallery. “My buddies typically jogged my memory that I ought to let these work be seen in a gallery setting,” he says.
Cai first experimented with gunpowder in 1984 at his Quanzhou studio. Whereas dwelling in Japan, he expanded his relationship with the fabric to out of doors explosion performances, which included the managed firework blast on London’s Millennium Bridge for his Tate fee and particular shows for the opening and shutting ceremonies of the 2008 Summer time Olympics in Beijing.
For its Tefaf presentation, White Dice will present a choice of Cai’s splashy avian work, that are heavy on azure tones, in addition to research for work he confirmed on the Gallerie degli Uffizi in 2018 and others created for a 2020 undertaking on the Palace Museum in Beijing. Cai says his curiosity in blue, after three many years of portray primarily in charred black, got here from a seek for “a non secular color”. However, he says, the fabric’s speedy transformation in tone presents formal and logistical challenges. The topic of birds, in the meantime, was impressed by the present social panorama dominated by “chaos, contradiction and battle”; the works’ imagery of flocks “carries with it a sure unease and turbulence of our time”, Cai says.
