Majestic
Gabriel Lester
24. 11. 02 — 12. 29
Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present artist Gabriel Lester’s solo exhibition “Majestic”, opened on November 2, 2024. Featuring new works created especially for this show, Lester delves into humanity’s enduring fascination with fate, using symbolic imagery and immersive environments to question our relationship with chance and control. This marks Lester’s first major solo exhibition with the gallery.
Gabriel Lester is an internationally acclaimed multimedia artist, inventor and filmmaker. His experience in directing film and theaters led to the cinematic lens throughout his practice. Lester’s work rarely conveys a single explicit message or idea, but rather stimulating the collective imagination by carefully staged sets and illusions. Sitting in the middle of the exhibition hall is “The Bait”, an installation that continuously emits an intriguing noise, greeting the audiences with a thrill of uncertainty. The sound comes from lottery balls printed with koi fish, tumbling inside a transparent container as if swimming in a shoal, evoking both tension and anticipation. In “Lucky Skies”, Gabriel Lester extends his ‘zero-cinematic’ exploration which he began with “How to Act (1999)”, where he only used spotlights, an empty stage and film soundtracks to generate the cinematic experience. The two low-resolution LED screens processing and resolving picture frames back to pixel spots, and intervene in any attempt to predict symbolic hints from the celestial bodies depicted in the video.
The site-specific installation “Augur” features crystal balls engraved with faint auspicious clouds, scattered across the floor, reflecting light in a soft glow. Further into the exhibition hall, “Return” presents a series of industrial conveyor installed on the wall that adhered architectural scale model trees and figurines. The looping scenery suggests the repetitive nature of life, but with an optimistic touch, as new perspectives emerge in the process of circulation. In “Clear Romance”, close-up shots of vintage lottery tickets from various countries capture a single piece of paper hovering in the air, carrying the weight of a ritual meant to manifest luck and fortune—universal desires shared by humanity. Signifiers in artworks spreading through the exhibition hall, staging a luring scene that unsettling audiences’ rational believe in odds and the randomness of the universe.
By coding, conditioning, and setting a dilemma, Gabriel Lester constructed an implicit narrative structure through a series of installations, videos and photographs in “Majestic”. As viewers’ movements shift angels through the space, a sense of time and occurrence unfolds, with the artist amplifies the correlating bond between installation and performance, transforming viewers into unrehearsed actors interact with and process real-time simulations governed by preset variables.
INSTALLATION VIEW
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gabriel Lester
Born in 1972 in Amsterdam, Gabriel Lester is an inventor, visual artist and director. Now lives and works in Netherlands. Gabriel Lester’s works across various disciplines including music, cinema, installation, sculpture, architecture and performance. Many of his works evolve around the very nature of the media of our time, and transform the space and time through meticulously altering the media and narrative forms. Strongly influenced by cinema and mime, Gabriel Lester’s works challenge the reality of perception and stimulate on collective imagination through constructing and creating theatrical illusions. Lester’s work is held in the public collections of 21CMuseum, KY; 798 Art Zone, China; Centraal Museum, Netherlands; CitizenM, Netherlands; MUDAM, Fondation Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Netherlands; Museum De Paviljoens, Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; and the Rabobank Art Collection, Netherlands.
Recent solo exhibitions: “Majestic”, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, China(2024); “Odeon”, Blaffer Museum, Houston, United States of America(2024) “Dig it”, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, the Netherlands(2023); “Holes in the Sky”, Machinery of Me, Arnhem, the Netherlands(2020); “The Return of Lester’s Loops”, Groninger Museum, Groningen, The Netherlands(2017); “If you happen to be”, Ryan Lee Gallery, New York, America(2017), and “How to Act”, De Hallen Haarlem, Haarlem, The Netherlands(2017).
Selected group exhibitions: “A Filed Guide to Getting Lost”, Museum Het Nieuwe Domein, Sittard, the Netherlands(2023), “Ridiculously Yours!”, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany(2022), “Ω, Om, Ohm, Omega”, Elektriciteitsfabriek, Den Haag, the Netherlands(2021), “Within Space—Time, We Walk Through Images, Glow Shenzhen 2021” – Futian, Shenzhen, China(2021), “Warehouse Story VII”, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, China(2021), “We Never Sleep”, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, German(2020), “Chapter I”, Het Hem, Zaandam, the Netherlands(2019), and “Weg en Water”, Burgerweeshuis, Amsterdam, the Netherlands(2019).
