Installation view
Installation view
Installation view
Installation view
Installation view
Installation view
Arshile Gorky
Virginia Summer, 1946
Graphite and crayon on paper, 18 ⅞ × 23 ⅝ inches (47.9 × 60 cm)
Arshile Gorky
Virginia Summer, 1946
Graphite and crayon on paper, 18 ½ × 24 ½ inches (47 × 62.2 cm)
Arshile Gorky
Virginia Summer, 1946
Graphite and wax crayon on paper, 8 7/16 × 10 ⅞ inches (21.4 × 27.7 cm)
Arshile Gorky
Untitled (Study for "Pastoral"), 1946–47
Graphite, pastel and wash on paper, 19 ¼ × 25 ¼ inches (48.3 × 63.5 cm)
© 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Arshile Gorky
Pastoral, 1947
Oil on canvas, 44 × 56 ¾ inches (111.8 × 142.2 cm)
There is some richness in just this little valley that does seem to inspire him. . .
—Mougouch (Agnes Magruder)
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Arshile Gorky, a key figure in the movement towards abstraction that transformed American art. This exhibition coincides with the travelling retrospective opening February 10 at Tate Modern, London.
Toward the end of his life, Gorky left the city to settle in the country where he produced his "Pastoral" work, which explored the arcadian theme that originated during the Hellenistic period and persisted through the Renaissance into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The current exhibition comprises fourteen drawings that he made in 1946 during time spent at Crooked Run Farm, the summer home of his parents-in-law nestled in the gently rolling hills of Virginia. Spurred by fears for his health (he had recently been treated for cancer) and his desire to compensate for the loss of almost thirty paintings in a fire that destroyed his studio, Gorky produced almost three hundred drawings in the period June to October 1946. His wife Mougouch reported Gorky saying that in Virginia "nature entered his head and closed his ears." He was drawing in the fields as if possessed.
Gorky went out day after day into the fields, looking intently at the various flowers and grasses that he saw before him and working freely with pencil, pens, crayons and watercolors. Later he drew multiple repetitions of the drawings made in the fields, which enabled him to ingest new ideas gained outdoors and integrate them into his formal vocabulary. He detached color from the drawn line to make them discrete pictorial components; he washed the drawings in his bathtub, hung them up to dry, and later scraped or sanded their surfaces. In this new experimentation with surfaces Gorky further altered the recognizable identity of an image through eliminating specific botanical or biological details. The resulting drawings, such as the Studies for Virginia Summer and the Pastorals are exuberant recordings of botanical and biological things taken apart and transformed into near-abstract renderings of a powerful life force.
The Summer 2026 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Ellen Gallagher’s Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish (2026) on the cover.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.
From their respective fields, three international cultural figures—artist and designer Ronan Bouroullec, fashion visionary Michèle Lamy, and chef and restaurateur Enrique Olvera—reflect on Donald Judd’s work in furniture, the subject of recent exhibitions in South Korea and Japan.
Laura Bruni writes about a major exhibition celebrating the work of the British sculptor Henry Moore at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.
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.
