Gabriel Chaile’s work is grounded in ancestry, architecture, and ritual. He transforms humble materials of adobe, straw, and metal into monumental vessels that reimagine the Indigenous forms and traditions of Tucumán, the region of northwestern Argentina where he was born and raised.

For Tinworks' 2025 exhibition, A Kin to Clay, Chaile created No puedo evitar la forma en que siento (I can’t help the way I feel), a newly commissioned sculpture in the form of a community oven. Inspired by the communal spirit of cooking and the energy of the kitchen, No Puedo evitar la forma en que siento makes possible collective moments of enjoyment and nourishment. Activated monthly, the oven sculpture bridges individual memory and collective ritual, linking Chaile’s practice with environmental legacies, including Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield—An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground (planted in Tinworks' field in 2024), from which the flour for community baking events was originally sourced.The public is invited to join an upcoming activation - check our events calendar for the next firing.

For Tinworks' 2025 exhibition, A Kin to Clay, and on view through the summer, fall, and winter until it was deinstalled in spring 2026, Chaile reconstructed Ella vendrá a pagarle todo (She will come to pay him for everything), an adobe sculpture first presented at BAMPFA in the exhibition MATRIX 283. Towering and symbolic, the vessel draws from familial memory and Indigenous ceramic traditions, transforming earth into a sacred form—part monument, part offering. The form of Ella vendrá a pagarle todo is based on funerary urns displayed at the Museum of Anthropology in Salta, Argentina. It also references the method of cooking in which one pot is nested in another, as the artist explains, “one shape helping the other to transform.” On view together, No puedo evitar la forma en que siento (I can’t help the way I feel) and Ella vendrá a pagarle todo (She will come to pay him for everything) considered the poetic and political potential of communal cooking, ancestral knowledge, and clay as a living medium.

Argentinian artist Gabriel Chaile is known for his monumental adobe sculptures that draw on Indigenous ceramic traditions, religious iconography, and family ancestry. His works evoke shared rituals and histories, transforming humble materials into powerful vessels of memory and meaning. Chaile has exhibited extensively around the world. His work has been the subject of solo and two-artist presentations at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal; the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Fondo Nacional de las Artes; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina. His large-scale, public work The Wind Blows Where it Wishes was presented on the High Line in New York in 2023. Chaile’s work was included in the Venice Biennale and the Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2022 and the New Museum Triennial in 2021.