Working in his signature medium of carved and painted leather, late American artist Winfred Rembert (1945 – 2021) dedicated the last thirty years of his life to creating a striking visual memoir. The consistently powerful and original oeuvre he left behind is a testament to the improvisational skill, determination and resilience required of a visionary shaped by a lifetime of extreme adversity. On 30 May, when Hauser & Wirth debuts the first–ever Los Angeles exhibition devoted to Rembert at its Downtown Arts District complex, West Coast audiences will finally have the opportunity to experience his story, told with both beauty and brutality. The exhibition will present two of the artist’s foundational series—the Cotton Field and Chain Gang paintings. These collections encapsulate two harrowing but formative chapters in Rembert’s life, reflecting his upbringing on a sharecropping field and his labor on a prison chain gang in the American South during Jim Crow. At once figural and abstract, Rembert’s compositions, vibrant color blocks and corporeal texture introduce the radical potential of tooled leather. Accompanying the exhibition will be a presentation of love letters written between Rembert and his wife Patsy, who was instrumental in his survival of trauma and subsequent development as an artist. Their incredible exchange, shared here with the public for the first time, documents their affection and hope which grew while Rembert was incarcerated from 1965 to 1974. - For his debut solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, New York-based artist Daniel Turner will present works created from salvaged and recontextualized materials extracted from the Oxnard Generating Station, a decommissioned power plant in Oxnard, California. Turner's transformation of remnants from the former electrical plant into a series of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and film echoes a calibrated process of material distillation and site-responsive reflection. Turner’s focused examination of the properties of alloys has led to large-scale paintings that utilize copper components extracted from the Oxnard site. Once removed, the material was spliced through an intricate milling process into refined copper wools. Subsequently, these wools were methodically burnished into the surface of the canvas, resulting in achromatic veils within his picture planes. In the sculpture 'Channel Conduit,' a coiled arrangement of materials stripped from the plant's infrastructure, which once facilitated the induction of seawater for temperature regulation, is displayed on the gallery floor. Turner’s latest film ‘Oxnard Harbor’ features aerial footage captured via drone depicting the vacated generating station. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, the monumental architecture points to the facility’s once substantial production of electricity for the greater Los Angeles region. Image: Winfred Rembert, Hard Times, 2003 © 2024 The Estate of Winfred Rembert / ARS NY. Courtesy the Estate, Hauser & Wirth and Fort Gansevoort. Private Collection of Michelle and Joseph Pratt