Chase Hall

Chase Hall was born in 1993 in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a Black father and a white mother, and his practice centers on what he has described as an exploration of "the impossible absolute of biracial identity." He did not attend college or art school, and educated himself once he settled in New York: he read art-history syllabi assigned at New York University on his own, tracked down the assigned books, and used canvas and supplies discarded by NYU students, developing his signature technique of acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas.

His development was shaped by a series of competitive residencies, including The Mountain School of Arts and The Macedonia Institute in 2018, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2019, and MASS MoCA in 2020. Early solo exhibitions followed at Monique Meloche Gallery, CLEARING, and Various Small Fires. In 2022, Galerie Eva Presenhuber announced representation, and Hall also joined David Kordansky Gallery, the two galleries that represent him today. That same year, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned him to produce Medea act I & II, a monumental diptych for its opera house. In 2023 he had his first institutional solo exhibition, The Close of the Day, at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, followed by Halfrican at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. He now teaches as an adjunct professor at New York University and lives and works in New York.

Coverage of Hall has tracked an unusually fast institutional trajectory. Artnet News has noted his path from a first institutional solo at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, in 2023 to the 2023 to 2024 solo show "Halfrican" at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, both read as engagements with the boundaries of identity. Museum and gallery texts consistently frame his work, built from acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas, as an investigation of race, biracial identity, and American vernacular imagery, with Hall himself describing the project as an exploration of "the impossible absolute of biracial identity." Institutional recognition, from the Studio Museum in Harlem's early attention to his work to a 2022 Metropolitan Opera commission, has largely reinforced that reading.

Hall's paintings began appearing at auction around 2018. Artnet News has reported that his auction high is a Christie's London evening sale result of GBP 75,600 (about USD 95,500), which it described as a record price for the artist; available sources place that sale around 2020, though the exact date and the specific work's title are not consistently confirmed across public sources. Other public sales, mostly at Phillips, have been considerably lower, including one confirmed Phillips result of GBP 7,740, indicating a market that is still early and thin relative to his institutional profile.

Hall's market is young: his first significant auction appearances date to around 2018, and public sales remain limited in number, so any single auction result, including his reported auction high, should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable price trend. He has no catalogue raisonne, which is typical for an artist of his stage, and there is no certificate-of-authenticity program, so provenance and verification run through his galleries, David Kordansky and Galerie Eva Presenhuber. His museum collection base is unusually deep for an artist in his thirties, which is the strongest signal of durability, while the auction record remains the area most likely to shift, and the least precisely documented, as more of his work comes to market.