Jeffrey Gibson, who will be the first Native American to represent the US at the 60th Venice Biennale, is suing his former gallery, Kavi Gupta in Chicago.
In the lawsuit, filed earlier this year in New York, Gibson alleges that the gallery has withheld more than USD$600,000 from the artist for works it has sold. The lawsuit claims the gallery ‘failed to timely remit Gibson’s full share of sales proceeds… Because the Gallery has stalled and failed to even negotiate in earnest a mutually acceptable payment plan, Gibson is now forced to commence this action to seek the full amount of sales proceeds which belong to him (together with additional compensation permitted by law).’
Kavi Gupta has denied the allegations and disputes the terms of the agreement between the gallery and the artist outlined in the lawsuit.
‘Myth, play and refusing to disappear: the kaleidoscopic swirl of They Play Endlessly serves as a concise introduction to the work of American artist Jeffrey Gibson,’ Chris Fite-Wassilak wrote in ArtReview last year, ‘encapsulating as it does his use of painting, craft and collage as means to unpick and repattern what is understood as contemporary Native American culture.’ His work ‘often has an immediate, vibrant punch, whose playfulness belies the knotted layers of history that shape it, with each work asking how we might continually reshape an understanding of what indigeneity is’.
