Retrospective

Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.

Avis Berman’s biography of Roy Lichtenstein, Becoming Roy Lichtenstein: The Path to Pop, will be published this fall by Abbeville Press, aligning with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in October. For the Quarterly she has adapted part of her text to focus on the artist’s formative experiences in New York in the 1920s and ’30s.

Nearly fifty years ago, Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns met in Paris and began a collaboration on what would become Foirades/Fizzles, a deluxe limited-edition artist’s book published by Petersburg Press in 1976. Now, on the occasion of the Jasper Johns retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Gagosian Quarterly looks back to the genesis of this project with a conversation between independent researcher Anthony Atlas and Gagosian director Bob Monk. Their discussion focuses on the creative encounter between the artist and the writer and on how the book and related works became a generative source in Johns’s art.

Tracking works by Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, and Eric Orr as outliers and outcroppings of the California Light and Space movement, Michael Auping argues that darkness—the absence of light and space—is a key element of the aesthetic.

Carlos Valladares tracks the artist’s engagements with Hollywood glamour, thinking through the ways in which the star system and its marketing engine informed his work.

Ed Schad, curator and publications manager at the Broad, Los Angeles, examines Takashi Murakami’s prolonged engagement with the practice and concept of the copy. An exhibition of new paintings by the artist, Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami, opened at Gagosian, London, on December 10, 2024; Schad reflects on Murakami’s recent works in the wake of his visit to the artist’s 2024 exhibition at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art.

As American identity once again comes into question during a politically charged election cycle, the Quarterly revisits the motif of the American flag in art. Here, John B. Ravenal contextualizes Robert Lazzarini’s new wall-based flag sculptures and elucidates the tensions they lay bare in the symbol of our nation.

The Fall 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Andy Warhol’s Mao (1972) on the cover.

Sydney Stutterheim has published Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics and Authorship in Art of the 1970s and 1980s (Duke University Press, 2024), a survey of performance art and related practices that involve, in various manners, the figure of the accomplice. To celebrate the publication, the Quarterly is publishing an excerpt that examines Chris Burden’s Deadman (1972).

Alice Godwin and Alison McDonald explore the history of Roy Lichtenstein’s mural of 1989, contextualizing the work among the artist’s other mural projects and reaching back to its inspiration: the Bauhaus Stairway painting of 1932 by the German artist Oskar Schlemmer.