Rising Star Chase Hall’s Coffee-Stained Canvases Receive European Debut

Over the course of the last few years, Zurich and New York-based dealer Eva Presenhuber has added some of the contemporary art world’s fastest rising stars to her already formidable roster.

Alongside heavyweights such as Joe Bradley, Ugo Rondinone, and Candida Höfer, the gallery now boasts the likes of Tschabalala Self, Shara Hughes, and, as recently announced, Swiss artist Louisa Gagliardi. Last month, the gallery added its newest and youngest artist to the stable, the emerging American painter Chase Hall.

Chase Hall, Early Bird (2021). Acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas. 183 x 152.5 cm. © Chase Hall. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber. Photo: Pierre Le Hors.

Hall has secured representation with one of Europe’s most esteemed dealers before turning 30, and as an entirely self-taught artist, though he has not done so by chance.

He has been turning heads with his acrylic and coffee-stained portraits for a number of years, with serious commercial and institutional acclaim already under his belt.

Whilst Hall works across sculpture, photography, and video, he is best known for his figurative paintings that explore the realities of being biracial.

Hall gracefully depicts individuals and groups going about their daily lives, foregrounding acts of labour in some instances, whilst in others exploring images of community or leisure.

One of the most unique aspects of his practice is the use of coffee as a pigment, first poured and then distributed in dappled brushstrokes over the white cotton canvas.

Born in 1993 in Minnesota, Hall grew up between Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, Dubai, and Los Angeles before finally landing in New York around the age of 20.

Despite not attending art school, Hall dedicated himself to painting around the clock, often using canvases and stretchers that had been discarded by students at NYU.

Refining his abilities through a number of residencies, including at Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in 2019, Hall’s work quickly found an audience amongst some of the most influential galleries, critics, and collectors in the US.

His first solo show was at Chicago’s Monique Meloche Gallery in 2020, followed by a solo in New York in 2021 with C L E A R I N G, a gallery well known for its early representation of in-demand artists including Harold Ancart, Marguerite Humeau, and Huma Bhabha.

Alongside important early solo exhibitions, Hall’s work has already made its way into significant public collections in the US, notably The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Hammer Museum, California; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles.

At LACMA, Hall’s painting from the collection is currently included in the museum’s survey exhibition Black American Portraits, bringing the artist’s work into dialogue with contemporaries including Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley as well as some of the 19th and early 20th centuries’ most significant African-American portraitists.

Now open at Presenhuber’s Zurich outpost is Clouds in My Coffee, the artist’s first solo with the gallery and his first presentation on this side of the Atlantic, marking another important milestone within Hall’s rapidly burgeoning career. —[O]

Main image: Chase Hall, Early Bird (2021). Acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas. 183 x 152.5 cm. © Chase Hall. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber. Photo: Pierre Le Hors.