Theaster Gates. Ground Rules (Scrimmage), 2015; wood flooring; 100 3/16 x 147 2/16 in. Courtesy of White Cube. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Gates makes excellent use of language to push otherwise familiar formal constructions toward a heavier kind of political poetry, and the title of the exhibition works on political, personal, and formal levels. In the most obvious sense, the exhibition speaks to the right of citizens to come together as a body, an element of political freedom enshrined in many declarations of human rights, including the First Amendment of the American Constitution. Freedom of Assembly also addresses a defining element of Gates’ practice: his freedom to compose new meanings using materials that, like ready-mades, bring embedded meanings and histories of their own. The title further references the artist’s creative freedom, after six years of aggressive accomplishment, to experiment with his own traditions as he consolidates his place as an artist.

The thirty-six works spread among White Cube’s three galleries could function as separate exhibitions. In South Gallery I, the artist presents materials harvested from a recently closed hardware store on Chicago’s south side, reassembled into explicit formal homages to artists of the contemporary canon. Atlas (2015) is a series of ascending forklift arms that make a clear reference to Donald Judd. Shrug (2015) is a micro-installation of bricks stacked on a well-made pallet that looks like a Carl Andre sculpture ready for transport. On the opposite wall, Tiki Teak (2014), a shingled roof missing a rectangular notch, is very Gordon Matta-Clark. Freedom of Assembly (2015) is a wood-and-pegboard re-creation of Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918) that penetrates the gallery’s ceiling to continue upward, perhaps infinitely. While tasteful and excellently composed, few exceed their references. Cabinet Work (2015), a line of ten mostly emptied display cases, is the least specific in its reference (Mark Dion), yet best sustains imagination and interpretation.

Theaster Gates. Atlas, 2015; metal; 16 arms, each: 49 3/4 x 7 x 4 in. Courtesy of White Cube. Photo: Ben Westoby.

The presence of such obvious citations exposes a problem at the heart of Gates’ practice as a maker of art objects whose production functions subversively as the financial engine for his more ambitious community projects in Chicago and elsewhere. Much has been written about Gates’ mobilization of the art market as a kind of fundraiser for privatized social programs, but less has been said about the power of this scheme to pardon any failings in the works themselves.

A generous interpretation of the works in South Gallery 1 would locate Gates’ power as an artist in inserting the narratives embedded in hardware-store materials into the history of art itself. However, given that each sculpture occurs within the space of White Cube, whose name itself is a complicit nod to the validating power of an institutional space to make art by claiming itself as a container for art, Gates’ concern to promote the art status of the materials he uses through formal homage is misplaced. As a result, the sculptures look too much like packaged formal solutions to the problem of art-historical inscription, too much like replacements for a lack of formal inventiveness independent from historical scaffolding.

The two works in White Cube’s 9x9x9 Gallery, Ground Rules (Scrimmage) (2015) and Ground Rules (Free Throw Possibility) (2015), are the exhibition’s best. These stunning painting-sized works were made from the reclaimed gymnasium flooring of a Chicago public school. Shuffled and reassembled, the new surface bears all the scuffs and scrapes of a well-used gym, while the red and black paint of its basketball court appear now as abstractions that stutter across the picture plane. While it is unlikely that these materials came from one of the fifty underperforming public schools closed in 2012 by Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the associations with this critical moment in the city’s history are plain and powerful. Together with the remains of the hardware store in Gallery I, the material associations in Freedom of Assembly assert the fragile spatiality of society, serving as a reminder that all spaces are subject to economic and political forces.

Theaster Gates. Diagonal Bitumen, 2014; wood, rubber, and tar; 96 ¾ x 120 ¼ x 5 1/8 in. Courtesy of White Cube. Photo: Ben Westoby.

The works in White Cube’s South Gallery II exemplify Gate’s inclination to mine his personal history for studio experimentation, though this is a less rewarding project. Appropriating the material legacy of his father’s roof-tarring profession, Gates produced thirteen large and unremarkable canvasses of various roofing substrates smeared with thick black tar. In the past, Gates has mobilized this material for its political potential (in his last exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, he partially tarred a Civil Rights-era fire truck); however, the teeth of dissent seem all but pulled from this group of paintings. Likewise, the sculptures Covered Vessel (2015) and Glazed Vessel (2015) are chunky clay pots wrapped with tar-soaked roofing materials, sitting atop reclaimed and expertly rough-cut wooden pedestals. They are beautiful objects, though here too Gates appears to have left any larger ambitions in the other galleries.

Freedom of Assembly is an unusually straightforward exhibition for Theaster Gates, relying too heavily on the merits of his sculptures independent from the larger projects in Chicago and elsewhere for which Gates is better known and appreciated. Though his sculptures are the material basis (and fundraising element) for this expanded practice, they can’t sustain interest on sculptural terms, on formal terms, apart from that wider practice.

Theaster Gates: Freedom of Assembly is on view at White Cube Gallery through July 5, 2015.

Elad Lassry, Devon Rex, 2011, C-print, painted frame, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. © the artist. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy White Cube.

Lassry has made a name for himself with a portfolio of images that draw strongly on the language of media and advertising. These flawlessly framed pictures with meticulous attention to detail appear to be pristinely placed products. On its electric green backdrop – like an outdated family portrait studio shoot having an acidic flashback – Lassry’s Devon Rex, is an image of perfection in colour, composition and lighting. Every distinctive curl in the feline’s coat is on display, every whisker discernible. Lassry’s works have a strong sense of presence, but it is not the subject matter that make this so, even when the subject is as distinctive as this unique breed of cat. Person, animal, object – what it is doesn’t really matter. With endless repetition – same format, similar composition, perhaps a varied color – what it becomes about is the surface, and the picture as object.

Elad Lassry, Pillow 2, 2011, C-print, painted frame, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. © the artist. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy White Cube.

The slick, colour-matched, self-admittedly ‘ugly’ frames that encase the images are highly distinctive, and perhaps more weighty than the photographs themselves. Carrying meaning and endowing the images with a certain aura, the frames plunge the pictures directly into objecthood. Like the hermetically sealed vitrines used by the likes of Koons and Hirst, the encasing structure confers a certain preciousness upon what could otherwise be a mass-produced object, whether it be a basketball, a severed animal, or here, a picture of a satin pillow.

This unfluctuating formula that Lassry uses, in this exhibition and throughout his work, through its repetition creates a space for boredom which opens up onto new meaning, and serves to collapse representation into abstraction.

Elad Lassry, Cat and Duck (Red), 2011, C-print, painted frame, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. © the artist. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy White Cube.

As in Cat and Duck, the shallow pictoral space continues into the monochromaticity of the frame, where a lack of tonal distinction between the elements fuse background, foreground and frame together. The highly reflective surface mirrors the polished figurine in such a crisp, clean way that I am sure many an accusation of digital manipulation has been made. The figure becomes abstracted and emptied of meaning – no history, no narrative, no future, just the present line, shape and colour.

In all of Lassry’s works, the figure largely serves to set up the investigation into formal elements and the subject dissolves into surface. The saccharine hues and slickness of the object are both seductive and offending – and it works. The photograph dissolves into objectness, and struggles between attraction and repulsion. Through repetition, sheer absurdity, over the top kitschiness and banality, the work of Elad Lassry creates desire in the superficial – and I just can’t stop staring.

Spread across both of the White Cube spaces in London, Jake & Dinos Chapman: Jake or Dinos Chapman, combines works made by each of the brothers in isolation from one another over the past year. After the self-imposed severance, their work and ideas were brought together to create a show, that despite this separation, is iconically and iconoclastically the work of the Chapman brothers.

Jake or Dinos Chapman, White Cube Mason's Yard and Hoxton Square, London © the artists. Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy White Cube.

They have produced individual works in the past – notably the novels of Jake Chapman, however, even the content of these texts reference and draw upon the brothers’ collaborative practice. The consistency of their work is a testament to their umbilical inseparation – two brothers, joined in ideas and execution, even when apart.

Within the exhibition at the Hoxton Square location, it is impossible to discern what has been created by Jake and what has been created by Dinos – and this seems to be the point. Much of what is here are things we have seen before – the ground floor is home to mock-tribal totems and figures – statues housed within dirty and discarded materials of corrugated cardboard, cotton swabs, ping pong balls, wood and exposed nails, complete with spatters of blood and coffee ring stains.

Jake or Dinos Chapman, White Cube Mason's Yard and Hoxton Square, London © the artists. Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy White Cube.

On the walls, a series of hazy, colourful, fairly innocuous oil paintings. At the end of the long space a group of swastika-clothed, animal-faced children stare and contemplate the work ‘One Rabbit Contemplating the Moon’. These perverse hybrids are nothing new, but the seamless transition of the orifice-faced children previously produced by the brothers becomes increasingly violent. The beaks, mouths and trunks of the animals protrude through open wounds in the faces, pushing out from the inside and disfiguring the children in a way that is far more disturbing than the smooth genital-faced children.

Jake or Dinos Chapman, White Cube Mason's Yard and Hoxton Square, London © the artists. Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy White Cube.

Upstairs sculptures of bleeding religious figures with reptilian tongues and protruding tentacles are juxtaposed with traditional oil painting in which the figures seem to melt as their flesh bubbles away, the details, unfortunately lost in reproduction – Jesus with a swastika carved into his head, Mary’s devil tongue flickers out, Baby Jesus lies in a state of rot and decay. Religion dissolving and disfiguring in a most grotesque way.

Jake or Dinos Chapman, White Cube Mason's Yard and Hoxton Square, London © the artists. Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy White Cube.

Always pushing to disturb, shock and disgust, the solitary vision of Jake and Dinos Chapman screams against all that is pure and sanitized. Arguably the show is nothing groundbreaking, but the brothers continue to make work, even when apart, that continues to contribute to their subversion of the world – a wholehearted commitment to their iconoclastic practice.

Friedrich Kunath. 2011. White Cube Hoxton Square, London. © the Artist, Photo: Ben Westoby. Image Courtesy of White Cube.

Scent is the first unexpected sensorial experience encountered the moment your feet touch the wine-colored carpet. Involuntarily, as scent so fervently does, the smell of the incense that burns in the corner triggers memories of a bygone era. A curiosity that takes me back in time to those imperturbable teenage days hanging out in your friend’s parent’s basement, a generation re-enacting a previous decade so nostalgically defined by peace, love and happiness.

This is, according to the exhibition title, ‘The most beautiful world in the world’ – Kunath’s own attempt to create a improbable utopian world within a white cube space. But this utopian world is a personal one – not a collective idealism. A whimsically constructed place of illogically excavated findings – a space of hazy memories.

Next, the auditory sense is awakened as soothing sounds fill the room – melodic overtures overwritten by the sound of crashing waves and chirping birds, interrupted by the record skipping, scratching and voices speaking out. But it is all just an illusion – the records scattered throughout the room simply props in the play, as is everything that fills this obscure place.

Friedrich Kunath. White Cube Hoxton Square, London. © the Artist, Photo: Ben Westoby. Image Courtesy of White Cube.

In one corner a Henry Moore-like reclining figure is eccentrically merged with a model train that runs in a circle round and through it. Perhaps a peculiar fusion of childhood memories – a beloved toy and an earlier encounter with the Father of Modern British Sculpture. A banana-man has stepped down off his plinth to cross the gallery space and greet you at the entrance. A man leans on a speaker covered in onion-printed paper, with a bird perched on his Pinocchio-like nose, and a chair with a giraffe balancing on his head.

These strange scenes feel like snippets of lost and forgotten time, plucked from the neural space in which they float and poignantly reconstructed here. They are slivers of lives and eras that are somewhere between life, imagination, memory and dream. Like the nebulous quality of memory as time passes on, truth cannot be separated from fiction. Recollections are not reliable, nor true – the burgundy family car so vividly burned into my childhood memory, never existed, but is likely tidbits of memory combined with a vivid imagination and years of reinforcement to create something that was never really there.

Like my burgundy car, these scents, sounds and sights are retrieved from Kunath’s memory and mixed together here in a synthesis of post-production to create something that now crosses over into the realm of the real.

The lesson learned here, if we adhere to Kunath’s claims, is that the most beautiful world in the world is that which you construct within your own mind.