David Castillo Gallery is proud to present A Tesseract, A Talisman, a new series of works by Sanford Biggers. As much an exploration of new materials and possibilities as it is a deeper engagement with ideas that Biggers has long pondered, A Tesseract, A Talisman is the artist’s first solo exhibition featuring both his tapestries and ceramic sculptures, and his fifth solo show with the gallery itself—marking twelve years of collaborative dialogue and history with David Castillo.

In a 2021 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Biggers reiterated the coevality of the past and future in his work. “For me,” he said, “that simultaneity of past, present, and future is always involved.” Utilizing vestiges of the past, he collaborates with history, touching what other hands once touched, conceiving something new whose eventual interpretations are ultimately unknown. The eight new works at the core of A Tesseract, A Talisman find their origins in Biggers’s multidisciplinary Codex series, for which quilts are the starting point. Possible encrypted signposts on the Underground Railroad, family heirlooms, shrouds that embrace the body—Biggers implicates the quilts’ past and purpose and alchemizes them into other mediums, painterly and expansive.

These pieces also reflect Biggers’s sojourn in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, a region known for its vibrant, historic tradition of crafts, and continue his relatively new foray into ceramic sculptures at Cerámica Suro (though he’s long transformed quilts into sculptural forms) which first debuted with the gallery in 2019, at Art Basel Miami Beach. The three sculptures on view—Double Braid (2025), Tower (2025), and Untitled (2025)—are comprised of hand-painted ceramic tiles and steel, and they embody a kind of kineticism, as if they were billowing. The small pyramidal pattern of Double Braid, affixed to the wall, seems to spiral and undulate; the origamic Untitled appears to unfold. They mimic movement and invite it: one must walk around the sculptures, observing them from different angles, to appreciate their depth.

Three wool tapestries—a medium that Biggers also first debuted with the gallery, in 2023—were completed in collaboration with the Taller Mexicano de Gobelinos, a tapestry workshop as renowned as the aforesaid Cerámica Suro and located just 3.5 miles north. These pieces, crafted from handwoven wool, natural dyes, and other textiles, extend Biggers’s practice of painting on antique quilts, this time creating new ones from the start, with their own stories and singular patterns. They recall, by turns, Biggers’s perception of his artworks as “future ethnographies”—objects that amalgamate time and space for historians and viewers to ponder, to trace, someday. Biggers references and implicates so much of history and its inherent interconnectedness, the way mandalas do; it’s fitting that he draws inspiration from those sacred geometric symbols, too.

A Tesseract, A Talisman represents one of many of Biggers’s firsts with the gallery: his first solo exhibition of quilt paintings debuted at David Castillo in 2014; “Laocoön” and his BAM bronze sculptures and accompanying videos—in 2016; his first antique quilt wall sculptures in 2020. The gallery curated Biggers’s first comprehensive solo booth at a fair, at The Armory Show in 2018. As David Castillo celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, A Tesseract, A Talisman (the gallery’s 160^th exhibition) is a simultaneous commemoration of Biggers’s poignant and darkly humorous inquiries, bridging an ongoing, eternal communication with both ancestors and future viewers.

Sanford Biggers (1970) was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives and works in New York City. His many national and international solo exhibitions include shows at the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of Art, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and the California African American Museum. His work has been featured in numerous group shows including, among others, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, and the Menil Collection. In 2024, Biggers received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; the year prior, he was inducted into the National Academy of Design as a National Academician, among others. In 2020, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. His installation, Odyssey, commissioned in collaboration by the Port of Portland and Regional Arts Cultural Council, is on view at the Portland International Airport; Madrigal, a commissioned public artwork in collaboration with Sanaa, is on view at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently featured in several group exhibitions nationwide, including VIVID: A Fresh Take at the Hunter Museum of Art, The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Desert X in Coachella Valley. Upcoming exhibitions include BUSTED: Contemporary Sculpture Busts at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park.