Gary Simmons: Remembering Tomorrow

Filling the northern galleries and outdoor courtyard of Hauser & Wirth is the gallery’s first presentation of the artist Gary Simmons. On view through May 22, Simmons’s “Remembering Tomorrow” follows the artist’s exploration of themes like race, politics, identity, and social inequality through a suite of new paintings, sculpture, and wall drawings. Simmons employs tactics of humor in the works on view, depicting racially charged subjects (characters like Honey and Bosko, once popular in American culture) in smudged strokes, captured in the midst of in innocent activities like typing or kissing—which only further highlights for the viewer the stereotypes embodied in these once-archetypal caricatures. The presentation also features the first West Coast presentation of the artist’s installation Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark, which the artist constructed from objects and materials sourced from New Orleans’s Tremé neighborhood in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.