Whitney Museum Names Nikita Gale 2024 Winner of Bucksbaum Award

Nikita Gale, a Los Angeles–based mostly artist finest identified for installations that mesh surprising parts, pairing video and sound tools with industrial supplies like concrete and metallic barricades, has been named the winner of the Whitney Museum’s Bucksbaum Award, which fits to a participant within the Whitney Biennial and comes with $100,000.

Gale is among the many most intently watched artists right this moment. For the 2018 version of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, the artist offered a sculptural and sound set up titled PROPOSAL: SOFT SURROUND SYSTEM (2018), dissecting the roles music and bodily limitations play in galvanizing protest and mass detainments. In 2022, when Gale’s work was proven at 52 Walker Avenue, the New York Instances argued the artist has turn into a part of a definite group of ladies artists of coloration making use of new guidelines to minimalism that have been set in place by an older technology of male predecessors.

For the 2024 Biennial, titled “Even Higher Than the Actual Factor,” Gale offered a participant piano for the set up TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME). However as an alternative of enjoying its set tune, Gale has made it so the piano emits no sound, apart from the clanking of the keys as they’re activated. Moreover, the set up, offered in a black field, is dramatically lit, with the lights oscillating up and down as if on a dimmer.

“Works like TEMPO RUBATO decline to carry out to the viewer’s liking,” ARTnews senior editor Alex Greenberger wrote in his evaluate of the exhibition. “In doing so, they refuse their viewers’ gaze, mirroring an unwillingness by many artists right here to take part in buildings that search to oppress them.”

Gale’s work, relating the physique to know-how, was chosen because the winner by a six-person jury, that included the Biennials cocurators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, in addition to Whitney Museum director Scott Rothkopf, Hammer Museum curator Erin Christovale, College of Virginia artwork historical past professor David Getsy, and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Artwork chief curator Stamatina Gregory.

In an announcement, Rothkopf stated the judging panel believes Gale, who’s the prize’s twelfth recipient, suits the mould of artists who’ve been influential to American artwork, describing their work as taking completely different varieties all of sudden. “Nikita Gale has an unimaginable knack for making work that’s each conceptually rigorous and filled with emotion, one way or the other disciplined and mysterious on the similar time,” he stated.