The exhibition’s titular work African Still Life #4 (2026) brings together objects including a gongshi (scholar’s stone), an antique brass shoe-shine stand, a memorial flag and a pair of custom Margiela Tabi roller skates. Designed by the artist in 2023, the skates merge the tabi – split-toed footwear that can be traced back to fifteenth-century Japan and first adapted by Mason Margiela in 1988 – with Chicago Black roller-skating traditions. In this constellation of contemporary and historical elements, African Still Life #4 also recalls the structure of an altar, paying ‘homage to the ancestral world’, where items ‘might be a stand-in for a direct descendant or ancestor, an acknowledgement of a place, a marker or an indication of time.’

Elsewhere in the gallery, a series of new wall-mounted ceramic works extends the artist’s exploration of still life through material and formal investigation. Composed of geometric shapes, they establish what Gates describes as ‘a basic visual language’, through which he approaches ‘the still life as an advanced strategy for drawing’. The elemental forms of works such as Receding Cloud at the Golden Time of Day or Black Moon (both 2026) also recall fundamental Buddhist symbols, such as mandalas and stupas, in which geometry organises sacred and cosmological space. Material transformation is equally central to these works, which Gates characterises as ‘studies in how the atmosphere of the kiln changes the surface of a work’. Once it has been fired, the artist notes, ‘everything that’s organic is gone. And what’s left is a fossil. Then I glaze it, I fire it again, and it has this new life. It’s no longer what it was; it’s molecularly something different.’

In the second gallery, the process of transformation moves from clay to sound. Here, still life takes the form of a listening room installation centred on the Dinh Nguyen Collection, an archive of more than 14,000 recordings assembled by the French Vietnamese DJ and record collector. While the collection spans a range of genres, Nguyen focused mainly on Caribbean music, particularly from the islands of Réunion and Mauritius. Responding to the presence of listening bars in South Korea, Gates has converted the gallery into a space for ‘deep listening’, inviting visitors to spend time there not merely as ‘observers of art objects.’ Through regular activations of the sound system, the artist fulfils his commitment to Nguyen’s family to play the archive publicly, rather than keep it as a private collection. As such, Gates’s installation is at once a memorial to Nguyen and a renewed form of cultural life.

When Nguyen died in 2022, French inheritance tax made it financially impossible for the family to retain his collection. Under this legal framework, the fiscal and cultural value of the DJ’s collection was transformed by death. The circumstances of the archive’s acquisition sharpen Gates’s interest in inheritance as both a practical and symbolic process: a means by which objects, knowledge and responsibility pass between generations. For Gates, stewardship ensures that Nguyen’s death does not consign the archive to the past but marks its passage into a new public life: from ‘the living to the dead to the living.’

Gates describes the African still life as an ‘ongoing anthem’: a structure of homage that reassembles and reanimates, whether through the arrangement of cultural objects, the elemental process of ceramics, the guardianship of an archive or the amplification of sound. Just as clay becomes a fossil-like material before glazing and firing give it new life, the archive passes through a comparable sequence of life, death and reanimation. In this way, the exhibition draws together Gates’s ceramics, sculptures and sound installations as forms of inheritance, preservation and renewal.

Theaster Gates was born in 1973 in Chicago, Illinois, where he lives and works. Gates has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (2025); Albuquerque Foundation, Sintra, Portugal (2025); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2024); Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2024); LUMA Foundation, Arles (2024 and 2023); New Museum, New York (2022); Serpentine Pavilion, London (2022); Frederick Kiesler Foundation, Vienna, (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2021); TANK Shanghai (2021); Prada Rhong Zhai, Shanghai (2021); Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta (2020); Tate Liverpool, UK (2020); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018); Kunstmuseum Basel (2018); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2018); National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2017); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013); Seattle Art Museum, Washington, DC (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (2010); and St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2010).

Gates is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees including the W.E.B. Du Bois Award from The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University (2026); Swiss Institute Special Tribute Award (2025); MOCA Los Angeles Legend Award (2025); 39th World Cultural Council Award (2024); Isamu Noguchi Award (2023); Friedrich Kiesler Prize for Architecture and Art (2021); the Royal Institute of British Architects (2021); the World Economic Forum Crystal Award (2020); J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development (2018); Nasher Sculpture Prize (2018); Sprengel Museum Kurt Schwitters Prize (2017); and Artes Mundi 6 prize (2015). In April 2018 Gates was appointed the first distinguished visiting artist and Director of Artist Initiatives at the Lunder Institute for American Art, Colby College, Waterville, Maine. He was the visiting artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome (2020); and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.