Beginning 14 September, Hauser & Wirth will present its first exhibition with American artist and revered Los Angeles educator Charles Gaines. Unveiling new grid works that focus on native trees from Palm Canyon, Gaines employs his singular ‘systems’ — methods he has engaged for over four decades to challenge subjectivity and direct personal experience. Alongside this entirely new body of Plexi work, Gaines will show a new series of watercolors as well as ‘Manifestos 3’ (2018), which comes from his acclaimed Manifestos series, of which earlier examples are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. This landmark exhibition in the artist’s adopted hometown sheds light on Gaines’s influence in the Los Angeles artistic community and beyond. His ongoing investigation of aesthetics, content, and ‘systems’ reveals the paradoxes of perception and implicit meaning: ‘The system has never changed, but the outcome is always different,’ Gaines has said of his long-standing practice. In the Numbers and Trees series, Gaines layers paint on acrylic sheets that sits in front of black and white photographs of the landscape. Each painted tree is formed by differently colored and numbered squares, taken together, they eventually collapse into a single image. By creating space between a specific symbol and the systems applied to its representation, Gaines’s distinctive approach forges a critical link between the first generation of conceptualists like Sol LeWitt and contemporary artists, including Gaines’s students Edgar Arcenaux, Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Sam Durant, and many others.