Los Angeles-based artist Nikita Gale has been selected as the recipient of the Whitney Museum’s 2024 Bucksbaum Award. Gale was chosen from the 71 artists and collectives who appear in the current Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing.
Gale is known for her installations that often combine dramatic lighting, sound equipment and video with industrial materials, creating a heightened awareness of the social functions of these performances. In the Whitney Biennial she presents TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME), 2023–24, featuring a modified piano that has been programmed to silently play a series of performances by various pop musicians. Illuminated by artificial lights that oscillate between hiding and concealing the instrument, only the clanking sound and sight of its mechanisms remain.
Gale previously cast velvet stage curtains and spotlights in concrete in IN A DREAM YOU CLIMB THE STAIRS, 2022, while her 2019 installation DRRRUMMERRRRRR featured a drum kit played by a torrent of water, in an investigation into what these technologies might become in the absence of humankind. ‘Ruin can be elegant,’ Gale said in an interview with ArtReview in 2022. ‘I don’t think it always has to be read as something that has been destroyed through active violence.’
The Bucksbaum jury consisted of director of the Whitney Scott Rothkopf, 2024 Whitney Biennial co-curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, Hammer Museum curator Erin Christoval; University of Virginia art history professor David Getsy; and Stamatina Gregory, chief curator at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
Gale is the twelfth recipient of the award. She receives $100,000 and will present a special project at the museum.
