Works Exhibited

About

My grandmother did hard labor in a ceramic factory in Communist Poland. This St. Barts exhibition would be her Midsummer Night’s Dream.
—Piotr Uklański

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of new pottery paintings by Piotr Uklański.

Uklański created his first ceramic mosaic in 1999 as a commission for the DT Symk department store in Warsaw—a monumental outdoor installation on three exterior walls of the building, which he covered with an abstract pattern constructed using commercially manufactured ceramic tableware and cement. The resulting mural evoked the aesthetics of Brutalist art and architecture. Uklański’s interest in ceramic mosaics was inspired by the use of vernacular pottery for house decoration and public art that was common in post-war Poland. His appropriation of this populist medium is consistent with his ongoing interest in exploring Modernist abstraction through more banal and quotidian materials and gestures. Since then, he has created numerous large-scale ceramic installations-including a thirty-meter long outdoor mural at the Kunsthalle Basel (2004) and a permanent mosaic installation in the tropical gardens surrounding the Museo do Açude in Rio de Janeiro.

In Midsummer Night’s Dream Uklański has developed these ideas further to produce autonomous “paintings.” Each individual ceramic vessel-with the varied styles of glaze, texture, and geometric form-provides him with a “palette” from which he composes his (unpainted) paintings. His sources for the ceramics are deliberately wide-ranging-from unique ceramic sculptures signed by other artists and iconic examples of modernist studio pottery to cheaper, mass-produced tableware and vases. He utilizes recognizable ceramic surfaces such as Pigeon Forge, raku or West German volcanic glazes as painterly tropes in his compositions, relishing the equivalences that are subsequently produced between the craft-based vocabularies and high art clichés of painterly gesture and formalism.

Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2026

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2026

The Summer 2026 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Ellen Gallagher’s Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish (2026) on the cover.

Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro

Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro

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: Reinventing Realism

Francis Bacon: Reinventing Realism

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.

James Turrell: Lifting the Veil

James Turrell: Lifting the Veil

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.

Divine Emanations: Nymphs, Poets, and the Painter’s Palette

Divine Emanations: Nymphs, Poets, and the Painter’s Palette

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.

Derrick Adams: View Master

Derrick Adams: View Master

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.

Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze

Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze

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.

Engaging with the Past: An Interview with Jenny Saville

Engaging with the Past: An Interview with Jenny Saville

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.

A Tremendous Generosity: Jeff Koons on Marcel Duchamp

A Tremendous Generosity: Jeff Koons on Marcel Duchamp

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

Donald Judd: Patiently Constructed

Donald Judd: Patiently Constructed

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.

Henry Moore: Monumental Nature

Henry Moore: Monumental Nature

Laura Bruni writes about a major exhibition celebrating the work of the British sculptor Henry Moore at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.

Picture Books: Mary Gaitskill & Jill Mulleady

Picture Books: Mary Gaitskill & Jill Mulleady

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.