Works Exhibited

About

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce Hiroshi Sugimoto's Joe.

"I photographed Joe employing the same approach as my architectural series. A finished building is a product of negotiation; I used an out-of-focus technique in an effort to regain a sense of the architect's core idealist vision for the building. But, as a sculptor Serra does not have to compromise like an architect; Joe is his idealized vision. Thus the sculpture is a representation of pure form for us both." (Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Hiroshi Sugimoto is best known for his highly stylized photographic series of seascapes, movie theaters, natural history dioramas, waxworks and Buddhist sculptures. These series provoke fundamental questions about the relationship of photography and time, as well as exploring the mysterious and ineffable nature of reality. Joe is a series of black and white photographs that Sugimoto made of Richard Serra's sculpture at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis.

In recent years, Sugimoto's work has become increasingly concrete at the same time as it has become notably more abstract. It has broken out of, or beyond, photographic illusion to touch the moment of an ideal space rendered in photography. In his Architecture series (1997-2002), rather than photographing key modernist buildings to elucidate their lines and volumes, Sugimoto blurred the image in an effort to capture not the buildings themselves but mental images of them. Similarly, using areas of soft light and dark, he has created fragmentary images of Richard Serra's sculpture Joe that function more like passages of visual memory than empirical recordings. Like a work of architecture, Serra's sculpture has to be experienced by walking around and through it. Permanently installed outdoors, it changes according to the time of day, the weather and the viewer's relation to it. Thus Sugimoto's photographs of Joe are parallel creations to the sculpture itself.

Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2026

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.

Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro

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: 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Peter Hujar & Paul Thek

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.