Charles Gaines began his career as a painter, but experienced an “awakening” when he discovered Buddhist art. Seeing the grid-like drawings and mandalas as maps of impulses and energies in the cosmos was transformative, leading him to develop works based on dense grids populated with numbers and colors. He used these to map mathematical equations, often taking the shape of trees. The resulting pixelated forms read like shadows, suggesting that there is always some outside force shaping what appears on the page; from Gaines’ perspective, he uses the grid to escape subjectivity. His generative approach to image making pushed the boundaries of conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s, establishing him as one of the foremost American artists of his generation.