LOS ANGELES, CA.- Regen Projects announced representation of Kevin Beasley. The artist will present his first exhibition with the gallery in April 2022.

Beasley’s practice is deeply invested in drawing out the histories latent in everyday materials and connecting these pasts to the present cultural landscape. This interest manifests in works that are produced by subjecting historically charged materials to transformative processes, reconfiguring and recontextualizing them to make new meaning. Harnessing the personal, cultural, and political associations of objects, Beasley investigates the history of power and race in America.

Beasley’s multifaceted practice includes sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, music, and performance. The artist’s process most notably involves the use of garments and raw cotton which he transforms using molds, resin, and polyurethane foam to make what was once soft and pliable into rigid and unyielding sculptures. What results are hollow, freestanding shells which imply human bodies through their very absence. He employs similar materials and production techniques in his “slabs,” borrowing the format of ancient stone relief sculptures or large-scale painting to emphasize their relationship to the history of art.

Beasley frequently activates his sculptural practice using manipulated audio and performance elements. These comparatively ephemeral gestures heighten and thereby redouble his commitment to material histories and the personal and political ramifications found therein. His approach is perhaps most vividly represented in his celebrated 2018 exhibition A view of a landscape at The Whitney Museum of American Art. For this presentation Beasley displayed a mid-century cotton gin motor from Alabama in a soundproofed vitrine inside the museum gallery. Though actively running and producing a thunderous roar, the motor was inaudible to visitors in the gallery. Beasley instead piped the audio of the running motor into an adjacent gallery using a series of specialized microphones, thereby disconnecting the visual and auditory experiences of the object.

Speaking in relation to the announcement Shaun Caley Regen said: “I have long admired Kevin Beasley’s work and it is an honor to be working with him. Kevin’s innate ability to craft stunning and deeply affective art from materials that are unassuming and yet historically charged forms a poetic and critical voice in today’s art world. We are thrilled to welcome him to the gallery and are looking forward to his first exhibition at Regen Projects in late April 2022.”

In addition to Regen Projects, the artist is represented by Casey Kaplan in New York.

Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) lives and works in New York. Beasley attended the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, where he studied automotive design before graduating with a BFA in painting and sculpture in 2007 and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University, New Haven in 2012.

A selection of recent and forthcoming exhibitions and performances include Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, New Orleans (2021), in which Beasley will realize a multiyear, site-specific project in the Lower Ninth Ward; a series of outdoor performances for the Performa 2021 Biennial, New York; The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2021); Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York (2021); a month-long residency and solo exhibition at A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (2020); and ASSEMBLY, a program co-organized by Kevin Beasley, Lumi Tan, Tim Griffin, and Nicole Kaack at The Kitchen, New York (2019). Other past exhibitions include Kevin Beasley, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); Hammer Projects: Kevin Beasley, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); in Harlem: Kevin Beasley, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016); and Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015).



Beasley’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Tate, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.