Theaster Gates, White Cube, London

When Gates won the Artes Mundi award this year, he responded, "Let's split this motherfucker" and divided the £40,000 prize between the 10 shortlisted artists. His art has always been built around grand social gestures: he recently bought a derelict bank in his native Chicago for $1, then raised more than $3m to restore it through art works, including slabs cut from the building's original marble, engraved "In ART We Trust", sold as the equivalent of expensive bonds. "So, yeah, it's a bank!" he said.

Working in many media, Gates goes beyond metaphor: he wants to bring about social and economic change directly through artistic agency. This new exhibition, Freedom of Assembly, explores the concept of assembly in its widest sense: individual freedom, empowerment, assemblage of objects.

Colourful vitrines showcase elements from a defunct Chicago hardware store - closed due to competition with conglomerates - alongside lamps, glass, sculptural objects, transmuting a sense of place and meditating on loss and reduction. Found materials are also the basis of "Ground Rules", where strips of wooden gym floor are reassembled into minimalist sculpture. In new large-scale tar paintings, Gates employs rubber, tar and wood to create monochrome shiny impasto compositions referencing both the history of gestural abstraction and his father, who tarred roofs for a trade. Operating as an artist within a working-class community is part of Gates' practice, and labour is a key theme: here clay pieces - small figures, ceramic bricks, pots - are combined into assemblage sculptures with tar and roofing materials.

Past artists, from William Morris to Andy Warhol, have blurred boundaries between making art, business and social reform but Gates takes to a new scale the convergence of visionary, entrepreneur and social radical. This show anticipates a major presentation of his work at next week's Venice biennale.

whitecube.com, 020 7930 5373, Wednesday to July 5

Photograph: Sara Pooley

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