Works Exhibited
About
For it is not possible to step twice into the same river, according to Heraclitus, nor to touch mortal substance twice in any condition: by the swiftness and speed of its change, it scatters and collects itself again—or rather, it is not again and later but simultaneously that comes together and departs, approaches and retires.
—Plutarch
Gagosian is pleased to present Retrospective, including works by Chris Burden, Marcel Duchamp, Tom Friedman, Piero Golia, Douglas Gordon, Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Takashi Murakami, Piotr Uklański, and Andy Warhol. The retrospective exhibition, conceived and realized by a museum institution, is perceived as a watershed in any artist’s career. This exhibition looks at various ways in which contemporary artists mine their own histories to create their own defining moments—the retrospective gesture as a means of creating a perpetual present, as a process of physical recollection, as a strategy of circulation, or as a pure conceit.
The exhibition begins with a famous twentieth-century example, Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise. Between 1935 and 1941, Duchamp created an edition of twenty boxes, each in a brown leather carrying case containing a myriad of miniature works of art, each with slight variations in design and content. Duchamp was already thinking about producing a box containing his works—or rather, texts and a few sketches—in the 1910s. These early musings led to the edition La Boîte verte (The Green Box) in 1934. Following this, he started planning another box containing all the works he had created since the beginning of his career, from Nude Descending a Staircase, Chocolate Grinder, and Nine Malic Moulds to three-dimensional replicas of sculptures and readymades, including the notorious Fountain. The painting reproductions were black-and-white photographs that he hand-colored, thereby creating “new originals,” which he then certified. Following his invention of the readymade, Boite-en-valise further underscores the interdependence of object and context so central to Duchamp’s circular definition of the work of art.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2022
The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.
In Conversation
American Artist, Yayoi Shionoiri, and Sydney Stutterheim on Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden
Join Gagosian to celebrate the publication of Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden with a conversation between American Artist, Yayoi Shionoiri, and Sydney Stutterheim presented at the Kitchen, New York. Considering the book’s sustained examination of sixty-seven projects that remained incomplete at the time of Burden’s death in 2015, the trio discuss the various ways that an artist’s work and legacy live on beyond their lifetime.
At the Edge
Chris Burden: Prelude to a Lost Performance
Michael Auping tells the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about the preparations for a performance by Chris Burden at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Southern California in 1974—and the event’s abrupt cancellation—providing a glimpse into the mindset of a young, aggressive, and ambitious artist in the early stages of his career.
Takashi Murakami and RTFKT: An Arrow through History
Bridging the digital and the physical realms, the three-part presentation of paintings and sculptures that make up Takashi Murakami: An Arrow through History at Gagosian, New York, builds on the ongoing collaboration between the artist and RTFKT Studios. Here, Murakami and the RTFKT team explain the collaborative process, the necessity of cognitive revolution, the metaverse, and the future of art to the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2022
The Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, with two different covers—featuring Takashi Murakami’s 108 Bonnō MURAKAMI.FLOWERS (2022) and Andreas Gursky’s V & R II (2022).
Chris Burden: Poetic Practical
A new publication exploring the work that Chris Burden conceived but left unrealized delves into his archive to present sixty-seven visionary projects that reveal the aspirations of this formidable artist. The book’s editors, Sydney Stutterheim and Andie Trainer, discuss its development with Yayoi Shionoiri, executive director of the Chris Burden Estate.
