About
Gagosian is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring over seventy drawings by some of the preeminent artists of the last century. Drawing has always figured prominently in art making, often serving as the study or sketch for a final painting or sculpture. However, as the twentieth century saw a focus on artistic process, so drawing came to often serve as the finished product, with its technique and materials intrinsic to the artist’s project.
Dating from 1906 (with a Pablo Picasso nude in pastel) to the present, and executed in a range of scales and media, the featured works highlight the numerous stylistic impulses manifest in drawing during the last one hundred years. Included are Arshile Gorky’s chalk and ink Study for Nightime, Enigma, Nostalgia (1931–32), a dreamlike musing inspired by Surrealism, as well as Willem de Kooning’s boldly expressive pencil drawings related to his renowned Women paintings from the 1950s. Also exhibited are several of Andy Warhol’s early drawn portraits, such as Woman (1962), which reveal traces of the graphic style that would figure prominently in the artist’s iconic Pop works. More contemporary examples on view are Richard Serra’s paintstick line drawings, a drawing collage by Jeff Koons, and large-scale new pastels by Francesco Clemente. Recent works by Georg Baselitz, Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville, and Cy Twombly—artists whose work is rarely seen in London—will also be featured.
Artists include: Richard Artschwager, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Cecily Brown, Francesco Clemente, Michael Craig-Martin, Willem de Kooning, Walter De Maria, Ellen Gallagher, Douglas Gordon, Arshile Gorky, Richard Hamilton, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, Richard Serra, David Smith, Frank Stella, Mark Tansey, Robert Therrien, Wayne Thiebaud, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Franz West, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Wright, among others.
Light and Lightning: Wonder-Reactions at Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field
In this second installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), focusing this time on how the hope to see lightning there has led to the work’s association with the Romantic conception of the sublime.
Donald Marron
Jacoba Urist profiles the legendary collector.
A Day in the Life of The Lightning Field
In the first of a two-part feature, John Elderfield recounts his experiences at The Lightning Field (1977), Walter De Maria’s legendary installation in New Mexico. Elderfield considers how this work requires our constantly finding and losing a sense of symmetry and order in shifting perceptions of space, scale, and distance, as the light changes throughout the day.
Twombly and the Poets
Anne Boyer, the inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award in Poetry, composes a poem in response to Twombly’s Aristaeus Mourning the Loss of His Bees (1973) and introduces a portfolio of the painter’s works accompanied by the poems that inspired them.
Augurs of Spring
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Richard Artschwager
A conversation between Adam McEwen and Bob Monk.
