Chase Hall (b. 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota) documents the ever-shifting lines between personal and generational narratives. Often rooted in autobiographical experience, his explorations of overarching systems of power result in works with both expansive historical sweep and intimate, of-the-moment connection. Hall has developed a distinct material vocabulary to produce paintings that arise in equal measure from careful planning and an improvised, call-and-response interaction with his pictures as they take shape before him. This process has become increasingly alchemical: the artist uses brewed coffee to make pigments that he then uses to stain cotton supports, offering an embodied critique of the ways in which oppression and trade have defined the course of global history. Hall’s images shed light on the social striations of the American collective—ongoing research focuses on the vivid presence of Black life outside of stereotypical vocational and leisure-based contexts—and show, by way of hieroglyphic symbols and painterly gestures, how forces of nature and archetypal life cycles define the unfolding of history and the creative emergence of artistic imagination.
Chase Hall was the subject of a solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia in 2023. In 2022, Hall was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to produce a large-scale artwork, the monumental diptych Medea Act I & II, for its opera house in New York. Hall has been included in group exhibitions including Day for Night: New American Realism, Palazzo Barberini, organized by the Aïshti Foundation, Rome (2024); Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Black California Dreamin', California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2023); NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2023); Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021); Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, University of Illinois Chicago (2021); and This Is America | Art USA Today, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, the Netherlands (2020). Hall has been an artist-in-residence at The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, Massachusetts; and Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Hall’s work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hall lives and works in New York.