One Work: Sanford Biggers’s “7 Heavens”

Sanford Biggers’s 7 Heavens (2013) boasts a sublime ethereality. The seven-foot-square red-and-yellow-checked antique quilt—currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum—pulls the viewer in through the artist’s painted addition of a minimal yet exuberant gold form at its center, suggestive of a mandala with the spiraling contours of a pinwheel. Atop this form is a billowing cloud, presumably spray-painted upside down, as the paint drips impossibly upward in this fina