Charles Gaines / Numbers and Trees, The Tanzania Baobabs / Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood
- LA Art Documents
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Charles Gaines
Numbers and Trees, The Tanzania Baobabs
Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, CA
February 19 - May 31, 2025
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. Following a major 2023 – 24 museum survey and an acclaimed public commission, Gaines returns to his hometown of Los Angeles to present a new sequence of his signature Plexiglas works at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood—the most elaborate treatment yet of his ongoing Numbers and Trees series, first conceived by the artist in 1987. Consisting of nine large-scale triptychs and a suite of new watercolor diptychs, all works are based on photographs of baobab trees the artist shot during a trip to Tanzania in 2023.
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. This approach invited viewers into the gap between what things appear to be and what they mean, while also challenging the dominance of subjectivity in artistic expression.
In this iteration of Numbers and Trees, Gaines implements a combination of systems never before brought together. The silhouetted baobab tree is meticulously transformed through a rigorous set of self-determined rules and procedures. Each tree is assigned a distinctive color and number sequence, creating layers of astonishingly detailed visual information within and on the planes of the Plexiglas box. For the first time, in half of the works, the back panel depicts the sequential progression of trees amid an enlarged detail of the tree crown, an application the artist refers to as an ‘explosion.’ This process breaks down his original photographic composition into individual cells which collectively challenge our perception and thwart conventional interpretation. The grandeur of the baobab—revered as the ‘tree of life’—mirrors the magnificence of Gaines’ process, where proliferating cells of color radiate in intricate branch-like patterns, each seeming to emerge from the unique form of every tree.