Dexter Dalwood
McCarthy's List, 2002
Oil on canvas, 80 ¼ × 109 ¾ inches (204 × 279 cm)
Douglas Gordon
Blind Grace, 2002
36 × 36 inches (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Archival museum board and photograph
Dennis Hopper
Peter Fonda (with Edward G. Robinson billboard), 1964
Gelatin silver print, 24 × 16 inches (61 × 40.6 cm)
Ed Ruscha
Lame Theme, 1975
Pastel on paper, 14 ½ × 22 ⅞ inches (36.8 × 58.1 cm)
Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #16, 1978
Unique gelatin silver print, 20 × 16 inches (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
Andy Warhol
Paramount, 1985
Acrylic and silkcreen enamel on canvas, 22 × 22 inches (55.9 × 55.9 cm)
Gagosian is pleased to present our group show entitled Hollywood Is a Verb. This exhibition explores the ways in which artists respond to Los Angeles as a landscape and Hollywood as an idea. It includes classic works by Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Dennis Hopper, and Andy Warhol, and more recent paintings and photographic works by Maurizio Cattelan, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Dexter Dalwood, Douglas Gordon, and Cindy Sherman.
Already in the 1960s Hollywood had acquired a lurid history and mythology associated with its location at the heart of the “dream factory.” For Ed Ruscha, who moved to Los Angeles in 1956, the Hollywood sign, the Sunset Strip, and the urban language of signs could be represented in a mysteriously cool, deadpan manner, whereas for David Hockney, who escaped to Los Angeles from the austerity and repression of England, the city was sunny, hedonistic, and gay.
Younger artists have seen Hollywood with deeper irony and an attention to the politics, sleaze, and darkness at the core of the entertainment industry. Maurizio Cattelan has remade the Hollywood sign on a hillside in Sicily, Dexter Dalwood’s new painting alludes to the effects of McCarthyism on the film industry, and Douglas Gordon has created a series of “blind star portraits” that exude a mordant humor and Warholian fascination with stardom.
As a complement to the works on exhibition at the gallery, there will be an evening of film introduced by Douglas Gordon on October 28, featuring Ed Ruscha’s Premier (1970) and Miracle (1975), Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964–66), Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949), and Sydney Pollack and Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968).
Curated by Francesco Bonami, Sunday is the first solo presentation of new work by Maurizio Cattelan in New York in over twenty years. Here, Bonami asks us to consider Cattelan as a political artist, detailing the potent and clear observations at the core of these works.
On the occasion of Douglas Gordon: All I need is a little bit of everything, an exhibition in London, curator Adam Szymczyk recounts his experiences with Gordon’s work across nearly three decades, noting the continuities and evolutions.
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.
Andy Warhol’s Insiders at the Gagosian Shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade is a group exhibition and shop takeover that feature works by Warhol and portraits of the artist by friends and collaborators including photographers Ronnie Cutrone, Michael Halsband, Christopher Makos, and Billy Name. To celebrate the occasion, Makos met with Gagosian director Jessica Beck to speak about his friendship with Warhol and the joy of the unexpected.
In this video, Jessica Beck, director at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, sits down to discuss the three early paintings by Andy Warhol from 1963 featured in the exhibition Andy Warhol: Silver Screen, at Gagosian in Paris.
Gillian Pistell writes on the loaded symbol of the American flag in the work of postwar and contemporary artists.
For his first solo exhibition in China, at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Maurizio Cattelan presented a selection of twenty-nine works that spanned his career. The exhibition was curated by Francesco Bonami, who joins the artist here in a wide-ranging conversation about some of the iconic artworks, the question of flaws, and what it means to be taken seriously.
Jacoba Urist profiles the legendary collector.
Against the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert highlights an array of landmark posters and the artists who made them.
Raymond Foye speaks with the actor who impersonated Andy Warhol during the great Warhol lecture hoax in the late 1960s. The two also discuss Midgette’s earlier film career in Italy and the difficulty of performing in a Warhol film.
Gregory Crewdson discusses his new work with actor Cate Blanchett.
Lisa Turvey examines the range of effects conveyed by the blurred phrases in recent drawings by the artist, detailing the ways these words in motion evoke the experience of the current moment.
Jessica Beck, the Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, considers the artist’s career-spanning use of Polaroid photography as part of his more expansive practice.
Rare-book expert Douglas Flamm speaks with designer Norman Diekman about his unique collection of books on art and architecture. Diekman describes his first plunge into book collecting, the history behind it, and the way his passion for collecting grew.
Gwen Allen recounts her discovery of cutting-edge artists’ magazines from the 1960s and 1970s and explores the roots and implications of these singular publications.
Cindy Sherman sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss her critically acclaimed exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, her solitary process, and selfies.
The Spring 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #412 (2003) on its cover.
James Lawrence explores how contemporary artists have grappled with the subject of the library.
Ed Ruscha tells Viet-Nu Nguyen and Leta Grzan how he first encountered Louis Michel Eilshemius’s paintings, which of the artist’s aesthetic innovations captured his imagination, and how his own work relates to and differs from that of this “Neglected Marvel.”
The Winter 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a selection from Christopher Wool’s Westtexaspsychosculpture series on its cover.
