The Importance of Elsewhere: on Ashley Bickerton
This documentary film includes footage of Ashley Bickerton as he gives a tour of his Bali studio during his final year, as well as interviews with artists Matthew Barney, Mark Dion, Damien Hirst, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Jon Kessler, and writer Paul Theroux.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2023
The Fall 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Derrick Adams’s Everything and a Ring (2023) on its cover.
In Conversation
Helen Marden and Kiki Smith
Ahead of her exhibition in Athens this fall, Helen Marden met with longtime friend Kiki Smith at her home in the West Village to discuss the bravery of color and the power of intuition.
Roy and Irving
Actor and art collector Steve Martin reflects on the friendship and professional partnership between Roy Lichtenstein and art dealer Irving Blum.
Sarah Sze: Timelapse
In this video, Sarah Sze elaborates on the creation of her solo exhibition Timelapse, on view through September 10, 2023. The show features a series of site-specific installations throughout the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, that explore her ongoing reflection on how our experience of time and place is continuously reshaped in relationship to the constant stream of objects, images, and information in today’s digitally and materially saturated world. In Sze’s reimagination of the Guggenheim’s iconic architecture, designed in the 1940s by Frank Lloyd Wright, the building becomes a public timekeeper reminding us that timelines are built through shared experience and memory.
Tetsuya Ishida: My Weak Self, My Pitiful Self, My Anxious Self
The largest exhibition of the Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida’s work ever mounted in the United States will open at Gagosian, New York, in September 2023. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the show tracks the full scope of Ishida’s career. In this excerpt from Alemani’s essay in the exhibition catalogue, she contextualizes Ishida’s paintings against the background of a fraught era in Japan’s history and investigates the work’s enduring relevance in our own time.
Jennifer Guidi: Mountain Range
In this video, produced by Château La Coste, Jennifer Guidi discusses her latest solo exhibition, Mountain Range, conceived in response to the architecture of Château La Coste’s Richard Rogers Gallery and the surrounding landscape of Provence in the South of France. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Gagosian, is now on view through September 3, 2023.
to light, and then return—Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann
This fall, artists and friends Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann will exhibit new works together in New York. Inspired by their shared love of poetry, fragments, and metamorphosis, the works included will form a dialogue between their respective practices. Here they meet to speak about the origins and developments of the project.
ANOHNI: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross
British-born, New York–based artist ANOHNI returned with her sixth studio album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, this past summer. Here she speaks with Michael Cuby about the genesis of the project and the value of life.
Come As You Are: Derrick Adams
Jewels Dodson visited artist Derrick Adams at his New York studio as he prepared for an exhibition of new paintings in Los Angeles in the fall of 2023. She reports on these works and on Adams’s embrace of joy, humor, and contradiction.
Douglas Gordon: if when why what
Douglas Gordon took over the Piccadilly Lights advertising screen in London’s Piccadilly Circus, as well as a global network of screens in cities including Berlin, Melbourne, Milan, New York, and Seoul, nightly for three minutes at 20:22 (8:22pm) throughout December 2022, with his new film, if when why what (2018–22). The project was presented by the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (CIRCA) in conjunction with the exhibition Douglas Gordon: Neon Ark at Gagosian, Davies Street, London.
FAUST and Vexta: Nonconformism
Launched during NYC×DESIGN week in New York earlier this year, a new mural by celebrated artists FAUST and Vexta was painted on the wall of Ligne Roset’s New York flagship store on Park Avenue South. Utilizing each of their distinctive styles, the two painters collaborated to celebrate the message of nonconformism as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the Togo, Ligne Roset’s iconic furniture design. Here, the artists talk to the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier about their aesthetics, scale, and the development of the project.
Events & Announcements
Panel Discussion
Expanding Climate Action in the Visual Arts
Friday, September 22, 2023, 5:30pm
New Museum, New York
Join the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation during Climate Week NYC for a panel discussion featuring recent Frankenthaler Climate Initiative (FCI) grantees. Through a moderated conversation with museum and university leaders, Expanding Climate Action in the Visual Arts explores current models for energy efficiency and clean energy in the arts—and concludes with a series of action items and next steps that arts organizations can consider taking. The event includes brief presentations by several recent FCI grant recipients, plus invited leaders from the cultural field who are shaping climate change action in the visual arts. The event will also be livestreamed.
Helen Frankenthaler, Reef, 1991 © 2023 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever
Art Fair
Frieze Masters 2023
Franz West: Papier
October 12–15, 2023, booth E01
Regent’s Park, London
www.frieze.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in the 2023 edition of Frieze Masters with a presentation of paper-based works by Franz West that spans his career from the early 1970s through the 2010s, conceived in association with the Estate of Franz West and through the initiative of the Franz West Privatstiftung. Chosen in collaboration with artist Oscar Murillo, the selection in London highlights West’s irreverence and ingenuity.
Collaging and overpainting imagery from print media, West disrupted the pictorial continuity of his sources and confounded expectations between public display and subjective experience. Blending abstraction and figuration, West’s works on paper exhibit an absurdist wit, with some exploring a mischievous vulgarity through an emphasis on bodily functions and erotic themes.
Franz West, Plakatentwurf (Sale, Gagosian Gallery), 2005 (detail) © Archiv Franz West, © Estate Franz West, courtesy Franz West Privatstiftung
Shop Takeover
Derrick Adams
RECESS
October 2–November 8, 2023
Gagosian Shop, London
Derrick Adams is taking over the Gagosian Shop in London’s Burlington Arcade with RECESS, a presentation of new work accompanied by the installation of his interactive sculptures Funtime Unicorn Spring Riders (2022) along the length of the arcade. Embodying the themes of play and leisure that are at the center of Adams’s practice, they may be ridden, transforming the historic space through an invitation to engage.
The Funtime Unicorn Spring Riders reimagine a motif first developed by Adams in the Floater series (2016–21) of paintings depicting Black people at leisure. A presentation of related works in the Gagosian Shop includes a new painting of a child playing on a Funtime Unicorn and the video Funtime Unicorn: Ruby Rides through Four Seasons (2023), an animation realized in collaboration with the graphic design studio the Channel and narrated by Aya Burns and Cleo Reed with music by Dave Guy of the Roots. An affirmation of childhood wonder and creativity, the video relates the imagined passage of a year experienced by a unicorn in an urban playground and across cosmic dreamscapes. The Shop will feature new merchandise designed by Adams with imagery of recreation, self-reflection, and sweet treats.
Derrick Adams, Funtime Unicorn, 2022 © Derrick Adams Studio
In Conversation
Alexandra Munroe and Tomiko Yoda on Tetsuya Ishida
Moderated by Cecilia Alemani
Monday, October 2, 2023, 6:30pm
Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York
Join Gagosian for a conversation inside the exhibition My Anxious Self, the most comprehensive survey of paintings by the late Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) to have been staged outside of Japan, and the first-ever exhibition of his work in New York. Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, will speak with Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities at Harvard University, in a conversation moderated by exhibition curator Cecilia Alemani. The trio will discuss the societal context in which Ishida developed his work, the artist’s striking representations of the challenges of contemporary life, and his unflinching view of his contemporaries’ inward escape into highly consumable popular media.
Tetsuya Ishida, Prisoner, 1999 © Tetsuya Ishida Estate
Museum Exhibitions
Closing this Week
Y.Z. Kami
Light, Gaze, Presence
Through September 24, 2023
Various venues in Florence, Italy
www.museonovecento.it
Light, Gaze, Presence presents a selection of works by Y.Z. Kami across four locations in Florence: Museo Novecento, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo degli Innocenti, and Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte. The multipart exhibition explores the pictorial universe of Kami’s paintings while placing them in dialogue with masterworks of the Italian Renaissance.
Installation view, Y.Z. Kami: Light, Gaze, Presence, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio Museum, Florence, Italy, February 17–September 24, 2023. Artwork © Y.Z. Kami. Photo: Serge Domingie
Closing this Week
It’s Pablo-matic
Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby
Through September 24, 2023
Brooklyn Museum, New York
www.brooklynmuseum.org
Fifty years after his death, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) remains an artistic and cultural icon. It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby examines the artist’s complicated legacy through a critical, contemporary, and feminist lens, while at the same time acknowledging his work’s transformative power and lasting influence. The exhibition is organized with the Australian comedian Gadsby, who has called out the inexcusable behavior of some of art history’s towering figures, including Picasso. With works by Picasso and various women artists, accompanied by a witty and incisive audio tour by the comedian, the show reckons with complex questions around misogyny, creativity, the art historical canon, and “genius.”
Closing this Week
Sterling Ruby in
ARTZUID 2023
Through September 24, 2023
Various locations in Amsterdam
artzuid.nl
The eighth edition of ARTZUID, the Amsterdam Sculpture Biennial, includes more than fifty outdoor sculptures by fifty international artists along a two-and-a-half-kilometer route in the borough of Amsterdam-Zuid. This year’s edition is organized around the theme of “transfer,” reflecting how artists and iconic movements of the 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s sought to transfer the site of artistic engagement from the institution to the streets. Work by Sterling Ruby is included.
Sterling Ruby, BLACK STOVE I, 2014 © Sterling Ruby
Closing this Week
Cy Twombly
Oeuvres sur papier (1973–1977)
Through September 24, 2023
Musée de Grenoble, France
www.museedegrenoble.fr
This exhibition, whose title translates to Works on Paper, presents a vast collection of works on paper made by Cy Twombly between 1973 and 1977, several of which have never before been exhibited. Realized in partnership with the Cy Twombly Foundation, the show explores how Twombly was able to evolve his artistic practice through drawing, collage, and printmaking—he produced only eight paintings during these years—and prepare for the creation of Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), his painting in ten parts based on Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad.
Installation view, Cy Twombly: Oeuvres sur papier (1973–1977), Musée de Grenoble, France, June 9–September 24, 2023. Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: © J. L. Lacroix, courtesy Ville de Grenoble