White Cube No. 1 is one of two small works Sharif produced in response to an invitation from curator Amanda Abi Khalil to participate in “White Cube...Literally: On form and convention of
display,” a 2016 exhibition held at this gallery that interrogated the ideology of the white cube as form, space, and institution. It presents a sequence of three white cubes composed of the same basic unit, increasing in size from two to four-unit length sides, recalling similar works based on cube number patterns by Sol Lewitt, whose practice Sharif was familiar with and admired. However, Sharif replaced Lewitt’s signature rigid open-faced white cube with store-bought cotton balls that he glued together to form the cubes, perhaps a wry nod to previous works with raw cotton such as Cotton and Wire (1995, on display nearby) and the 2013 video and object diptych Cotton. Sharif’s canny substitution introduces an element of chance into an otherwise systematic approach, challenging its integrity and the orthogonal logic it is based on. As the size of the cube grows, and the number of cotton balls used increases, so does the physical impact of their pliability on the whole, their softness compromising the rigidity of the grid—which is at once a physical, visual, and ideological structure—from within.