The problem is how one accepts the rules of reality….If everyone tells you not to jump off the roof or you’ll die, you don’t jump because you trust it as if it were truth. Maybe the artist is the one who’s going to tell you that you can jump, and maybe you’re not going to die.
—Piero Golia
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present Piero Golia’s first exhibition in Los Angeles.
From the outset of his career, Golia’s principal focus has been the theatrical and the conceptual in art, specifically supreme gestures and the completion of seemingly impossible acts. On January 14, 2006, he vanished from New York City, leaving no documented proof of his whereabouts. He reappeared the morning of February 7 at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen to give a lecture about his adventure. In 2008, he compacted a full-size passenger bus to fit into a 10’ x 20’ booth at the Los Angeles Art Fair. Two years later, he installed Luminous Sphere on top of the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles. This glowing orb, illuminated only when Golia is in town, acts as a mysterious cipher for the projection of meaning by the casual passerby—and thus a contemporary urban legend is born.
In this exhibition, Golia applies his embrace of contingency to more traditional forms of art production. The Constellation Paintings derived from an incident in 2010 where a taxi-driver smashed his car directly into Golia’s house following an argument over a fare. The impact demolished most of his possessions including his collection of art, furniture, and design. Salvaging debris from the total disaster, Golia burnished the remnants and embedded them within large slabs of jet-black glossy resin to produce vast abstractions with lustrous, galactic surfaces. In these “action paintings,” scintillating particles create the illusion of whirling movement, and the impressive scale imbues them with a wondrous quality.
