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
Tom Friedman once remarked: 'David Bohm said"…according to today's laws of physics, the bumble should not be able to fly…the shape of its wings, their velocity of operation, and their size, compared to the bumble bee's body, make no sense...it's a miracle, it's comical, and it cannot be denied."…This is why I am an artist'. Friedman is pushing the envelope of what is art, what is reality, and in fact, what is comical and a miracle. He is known for transforming mundane materials into meticulously crafted works of art. His work is easily accessed by anyone, the entrance being a flippant level of humor that takes one into a deeper phenomenological discourse about art and life itself. He can seduce us to these deeper levels, or we can enjoy the artwork for its simple humor and beauty. Upon viewing his work, we are left in wonder. The "suchness", as he is known to say, of the everyday materials, reveal something greater than themselves. Freidman's work is exhibited in major museums throughout the world, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Institute in Chicago. In 2000 a career retrospective traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago: the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, among other venues. One well known work exhibited throughout Europe is Mary Magdalen, (2003). Friedman haunts us with a statue of a woman constructed out of a black garbage bag. She is small, frail, weighted down, shadow like. She is born by Friedman's careful tearing and shredding of one, large garbage bag. The artist takes us to a somber place, conjuring up women's oppression, biblical references, and modern human abuse of mother earth, garbage weighing her down. Friedman's use of everyday materials as of late has required more us: the gap between the banal and the message is greater. With his piece Up in the Air, debuting at Magasin 3, Friedman has pushed his investigation of the object as far as it can go: to the question of "space itself" he says. Friedman states: "What interests me is my inability to process everything that I am confronted with: the more closely I inspect something, the less clear it becomes…it's as if the object dissolves into itself, becoming ultimately not itself, a kind of negation that enhances its meaning." In his piece at Magasin 3, Up in the Air, Friedman has installed in a large expanse hundreds of handmade, meticulously crafted objects. One is confronted with objects grouped together in clusters of meaning, and at various heights and distances. The observer must carefully navigate through the space. The space between the objects becomes as important, or even more important, than the everyday objects themselves. The space becomes palpable. The space itself becomes an object, much like Duchamp's mile long string piece (1942). Friedman says, "I am both petrified and seduced by the open system, because, ultimately, there can be no open system. It closes in on itself, revealing to us both the categorization of objects and our assumptions about them, and the stretching of meaning that is then possible…like why is there something, and not nothing…"
#TomFriedman
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.
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.
The Art of Biography
Peter Hujar & Paul Thek
Andrew Durbin’s dual biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, tracks the convergences and divergences in the lives of the two artists, from their first meeting in Coral Cables, Florida, in 1956 through their generative romantic and creative partnership in New York, Italy, Fire Island, and beyond. Ahead of the release, Durbin met with the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to speak about the development of the project, the sublime noncompliance of these two artists, and the motifs of love, death, and rebirth that weave through the telling of their story.