Artist: Charles Gaines

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 by the artist in 1986. Focusing on acacia trees, the nine compositions are based on photographs the artist shot during a trip to Tanzania in 2023. Gaines also debuts the latest instalment from his Manifestos series, developed whilst in residence at the gallery’s Somerset location in 2025.

Trees have been a central motif in Gaines’ practice since the 1970s, when he first began plotting their forms through systems of numbered grids in the Walnut Tree Orchard series (1975 – 2014). By converting the tree form into a gridded geometry, Gaines devised a distinctive process for charting and comparing differences, while also challenging the dominance of subjectivity in artistic expression.

Since 2008 across his Manifestos series, Gaines has disarmed and drawn upon historical texts, uniting the rational, mathematical and lyrical structures of music with the irrationality of violence, racial tensions and social injustice. Comprised of a new musical composition, two-channel video, and five drawings, 'Manifestos 7' (2026) examines rulings from two landmark US Supreme Court cases, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Charles Gaines will collaborate on—along with Firelei Báez and Cristina Iglesias—and contribute to a group exhibition organised by Rashid Johnson at Hauser & Wirth Menorca from June 2026. A book of Gaines’ collected writings will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in spring 2027.