Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2026
The Summer 2026 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Ellen Gallagher’s Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish (2026) on the cover.
About
ARTIST STATEMENT
For the past thirteen years my work has engaged issues of identity, intimacy and mortality. While predominantly sexually explicit, the primary focus of my work has consistently been on the psychological aspects of physical experience. The underlying content addresses the quest for emotional closeness and connection. In 1999 I began an extensive project depicting men engaged in a fetish, which involves donning multi-layered rubber suits. I employed a new medium, watercolor (transparent and opaque, i.e. gouache), as I felt it best described a fluid, disembodied consciousness encased within a confining structure. The rubber suits act as a second skin, while the opaque shapes that surround the men describe both the isolation within the suit and a location or barrier around the men. The highly deliberate subtlety in value and form created by delicate washes, give a vaporous quality to the figures. The shape around the men becomes symbolic of both a specific space and a void, echoing the men's transparent bodies within their suits. This work has evolved into its current form, which involves life-size figures in rubber, suspended from trees in the woods. Identification either with the hanging masochist or the controlling sadist is immediate due to the large scale of the bodies. The woods, painted in gouache, in which the figures hang are blurred, are muted and abstracted to create the muffled perception of the landscape in a combination with the luminous transparency of the figures acts as a disjunctive element between exterior and interior dimensions. The larger than life watercolor heads included here are my most recent works. The pumps and tubes emanating from the anonymous heads highlight the psychological and physical aspect of the suffocation and heightens awareness of both confinement and breathing that is essential to this activity. The liquid, impenetrable rubber acts as a kind of mirror for the viewer; not allowing interpretation of facial expression, one is prone to projection of self-reflection. Landscape in these works is internalized, echoing or superimposing the landscape within the boundaries of the body and mind.
Website
Now available
Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro
In this video, Jenny Saville sits down inside her first major exhibition in Venice to discuss how the great Venetian artists of the past and the city’s heritage influence her work. The show brings together more than thirty canvases and works on paper from the 1990s to the present, tracing the development of her practice, which is deeply rooted in the history of painting.
Francis Bacon: Reinventing Realism
Francis Bacon lived and worked in Paris for a decade starting in the mid-1970s. The city and the art he encountered there provided a profound backdrop for his austere late style, which often brings together smooth, colorful backgrounds, spare architectural signifiers, and sculptural human forms. Here, three striking paintings from that period are considered by Sebastian Smee.
James Turrell: Lifting the Veil
An exhibition at Gagosian, Hong Kong, brings together three of James Turrell’s Glasswork pieces along with site plans, photographs, and models of his Skyspaces and Roden Crater. Here, Alice Godwin explores the history of the Glassworks and their relationship to the artist’s wider practice.
Divine Emanations: Nymphs, Poets, and the Painter’s Palette
Janne Sirén considers Anselm Kiefer’s new paintings, the subject of an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, entitled Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still.
Derrick Adams: View Master
On April 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened the first midcareer survey of Derrick Adams’s multidisciplinary practice. Covering over twenty years of work, the exhibition, titled View Master, brings together the artist’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, and video, as well as a vibrant new commission created for the museum’s façade. Ahead of the opening, Adams met with Tessa Bachi Haas, cocurator of the survey, to discuss his formative experiences with television, the impact of his work in arts education on his practice, and the importance of taking a more complex, more joyful, and more expansive approach to Black American life and culture.
Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze
Adam D. Weinberg has been working with Giuseppe Penone on an exhibition of the artist’s new sculptures, The Reflection of Bronze, that opens at Gagosian, New York, on April 22. The works explore the character and possibilities of bronze. Here, Weinberg considers Penone’s enduring engagement with the alloy and addresses the conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition’s three-room structure.
Engaging with the Past: An Interview with Jenny Saville
On March 28, a major exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work opened at Ca’ Pesaro–Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice, bringing together nearly thirty paintings from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition is curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the museums division at Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro, Museo Fortuny, and head of MUVE in Mestre. Saville’s monumental canvases are set in dialogue with the great Venetian artists of the past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage. Here, the artist speaks with Stefania Ventra, professor with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, about her early trips to Venice, the radicality of Titian’s painting, and depicting emotional truth.
A Tremendous Generosity: Jeff Koons on Marcel Duchamp
Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.
Donald Judd: Patiently Constructed
From their respective fields, three international cultural figures—artist and designer Ronan Bouroullec, fashion visionary Michèle Lamy, and chef and restaurateur Enrique Olvera—reflect on Donald Judd’s work in furniture, the subject of recent exhibitions in South Korea and Japan.
Henry Moore: Monumental Nature
Laura Bruni writes about a major exhibition celebrating the work of the British sculptor Henry Moore at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.
Picture Books: Mary Gaitskill & Jill Mulleady
The most recent edition of Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, pairs Mary Gaitskill’s novella STAUF: A Tragedy with Jill Mulleady’s painting The Shift. In celebration of this forthcoming publication, Gaitskill and Mulleady discuss the myth of Faust, good and evil in the digital age, and the channeling of raw matter into art.