Roger Ballen, Handyman, 1996, 1996
Selenium-toned gelatin silver print, 15 × 15 inches (38.1 × 38.1 cm), edition of 35
© Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen
Children on Bed, 1996
Selenium toned gelatin silver print, 15 × 15 inches (38.1 × 38.1 cm), edition of 35
Roger Ballen
Security Guard and Girlfriend, 1997
Selenium toned gelatin silver print, 15 × 15 inches (38.1 × 38.1 cm), edition of 35
Roger Ballen
Man Bending Over, 1998
Selenium toned gelatin silver print, 15 × 15 inches (38.1 × 38.1 cm), edition of 35
Roger Ballen
Partytime, 1998
Selenium toned gelatin silver print, 15 × 15 inches (38.1 × 38.1 cm), edition of 35
Roger Ballen
Cat Catcher, 1998
Selenium toned gelatin silver print, 15 × 15 inches (38.1 × 38.1 cm), edition of 35
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present Roger Ballen's inaugural exhibition in the United States featuring many of his photographs from the award-winning book, Outland (Phaidon Press, 2001). Ballen, a New York native, has been living in Johannesburg, South Africa since 1974. Trained as a geologist, Ballen has been photographing for over 25 years, mostly in remote areas outside of Johannesburg. Working among a population so clearly overlooked and invisible, they face Ballen's camera with both the freshness of children and the faces of hard experience. This will be the gallery's first exclusively photographic exhibition in the penthouse galleries at 980 Madison Avenue.
A wiry, older man with a pixie haircut bends over a bed, imitating a spider. A scrap collector stands on a disintegrating foam mattress, contemplating a globe –an Atlas of the junkyard with a sleeping Doberman at his feet. A short and stern security guard poses in David Hockney glasses, his nightstick upright as his girlfriend, her eyes and face broadened by even thicker lenses, sits complacently on the edge of their bed. In Roger Ballen's photographs, the sitters are fundamentally linked to their environment, gods born from the walls, floors and furniture. Ballen's photographs convey sitters whose unique disposition in life seems to have sculpted their bodies. However, they also rely upon an exquisitely rigorous formal approach, mixing a draftsman's eye for line and detail with the documentary photographer's obsession for veracity with universal appeal. Included will be portraits, interiors and still-lifes executed between the mid-1980s and today, many of which have never before been exhibited or published.
Ballen has been short-listed for the prestigious Citigroup Private Bank Photography Prize, to be awarded in London in February 2002. Outland recently won The Best Photographic Book of the Year award at PhotoEspana 2001. Ballen's photographs are the subjects of four previous volumes including Platteland, Images of a Rural South Africa and Cette Afrique là. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Kunsthaus, Zürich; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris and others.
Art for a Safe and Healthy California is a benefit exhibition and auction jointly presented by Jane Fonda, Gagosian, and Christie’s to support the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California. Here, Fonda speaks with Gagosian Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab about bridging culture and activism, the stakes and goals of the campaign, and the artworks featured in the exhibition.
The Summer 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail of Roy Lichtenstein’s Bauhaus Stairway Mural (1989) on the cover.
Join Gagosian for a conversation between director, producer, and writer Sophia Heriveaux and actor, director, and writer Roger Guenveur Smith inside the exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street, at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Heriveaux and Guenveur Smith both share a personal connection to Basquiat: Heriveaux is the artist’s niece and Guenveur Smith was one of his friends and collaborators. The pair discuss Basquiat’s work and legacy, as well as his lasting impact on contemporary art and culture.
Sébastien Delot is director of conservation and collections at the Musée national Picasso–Paris and the organizer of the first retrospective to focus on Anselm Kiefer’s use of photography, which was held at Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut (Musée LaM) in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France. He recently sat down with Gagosian director of photography Joshua Chuang to discuss the exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Punctum at Gagosian, New York. Their conversation touched on Kiefer’s exploration of photography’s materials, processes, and expressive potentials, and on the alchemy of his art.
The Olympic and Paralympic Games arrive in Paris on July 26. Ahead of this momentous occasion, Yasmin Meichtry, associate director at the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage, Lausanne, Switzerland, meets with Gagosian senior director Serena Cattaneo Adorno to discuss the Olympic Games’ long engagement with artists and culture, including the Olympic Museum, commissions, and the collaborative two-part exhibition, The Art of the Olympics, being staged this summer at Gagosian, Paris.
Join Brooke Holmes, professor of Classics at Princeton University, and Lissa McClure and Katarina Jerinic, executive director and collections curator, respectively, at the Woodman Family Foundation, as they discuss Francesca Woodman’s preoccupation with classical themes and archetypes, her exploration of the body as sculpture, and her engagement with allegory and metaphor in photography.
David Cronenberg’s film The Shrouds made its debut at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in France. Film writer Miriam Bale reports on the motifs and questions that make up this latest addition to the auteur’s singular body of work.
Join Vladimir Yavachev, director of operations for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, as he discusses the genesis of the artist’s work Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963–2014), which Gagosian presented at Art Basel Unlimited 2024.
In conjunction with Marks and Whispers, at Gagosian, Rome, Oscar Murillo and Alessandro Rabottini sit down to discuss the artist’s paintings and works on paper in the exhibition, as well as how the show emphasizes the formal, political, and social dimensions of the color red in Murillo’s work of the last decade.
On the occasion of Art Basel 2024, creative agency Villa Nomad joins forces with Ghetto Gastro, the Bronx-born culinary collective by Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker, to stage the interdisciplinary pop-up BRONX BODEGA Basel. The initiative brings together food, art, design, and a series of live events at the Novartis Campus, Basel, during the course of the fair. Here, Jon Gray from Ghetto Gastro and Sarah Quan from Villa Nomad tell the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier about the project.
In this video, Flavin Judd, the artist’s son and artistic director of Judd Foundation, discusses a historic large-scale work by his father from 1970, ahead of its presentation at Art Basel Unlimited 2024.
Founded in 1998 by Issey Miyake, A-POC (“A Piece of Cloth”) set out to bring the development and production of fabric and garments into the future. Over the subsequent decades, A-POC has worked at the forefront of technology to realize its goals, and under the leadership of Yoshiyuki Miyamae—who has been with Miyake Design Studio since 2001—A-POC ABLE has engaged in a dynamic series of collaborations with artists, architects, craftspeople, and new technologies to rethink how clothing is designed and made. On the occasion of the line being made available in the United States for the first time, the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier visited the brand’s flagship in New York to speak with Yoshiyuki about the A-POC process, as well as the latest collaboration with the artist Sohei Nishino.
