About
Gagosian is pleased to present Summer Show, a group exhibition featuring work by Tom Friedman, Douglas Gordon, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Jenny Saville, Alec Soth, and Franz West, chosen for its emphasis on the physical form.
The expressionless pose of Tom Friedman’s bigbluefigure consciously recalls the conventions of classical sculpture. The exaggerated spatial proportions and almost fluid interchangeability of Styrofoam and marble mark an experimental approach to form and material that Friedman takes in many of his sculptural works.
Although sharing a similar affinity for the monumental, Jenny Saville’s paintings of grotesques exploit the organic qualities of paint that compose her semiabstract corporeal figures, in this instance a slaughtered pig. Marked by broad, messy brushstrokes, Suspension is firmly rooted in the physical world of blood and decay.
Damien Hirst’s triptych The Sun, The Moon and The Earth expands on his career-long preoccupation with life, death, and mortality. The work is part of an ongoing series of paintings in which Hirst’s use of real butterflies as a metaphor for nature and beauty symbolizes the precarious balance of life.
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For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.
Sydney Stutterheim meditates on the power and possibilities of small-format artworks throughout time.
Shortlist
Five Preoccupations: Jenny Saville
Jenny Saville shares a selection of the books, films, and more that have been her companions in the quiet of the shutdowns in recent months and as she looks ahead to a new exhibition next year.
In Conversation
Jenny Saville and Nicholas Cullinan
Jenny Saville speaks with Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, from her studio. They discuss portraiture, her latest work, and her art historical influences, as well as the shifting nature of perception in the age of digital communication.
In the Studio: Damien Hirst’s Veil Paintings
Damien Hirst speaks about his Veil paintings with Gagosian’s Alison McDonald. “I wanted to make paintings that were a celebration,” he says, “and that revealed something and obscured something at the same time.”
Damien Hirst: Visual Candy
James Fox considers the origins of Damien Hirst’s Visual Candy paintings on the occasion of a recent exhibition of these early works in Hong Kong.
Damien Hirst: Colour Space Paintings
Blake Gopnik examines the artist’s “dot” paintings in relation to the history of representation in Western art, in which dabs of paint have served as fundamental units of depiction and markers of objective truth.
