Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2024
The Fall 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Andy Warhol’s Mao (1972) on the cover.
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce a major and unprecedented survey of the work of Lucio Fontana. Six of his groundbreaking environments, known as Ambienti Spaziali, have been faithfully reconstructed, providing a completely new perspective for the rich and varied retrospective of more than one hundred major works that surrounds them. Curated by Germano Celant, assisted by Gagosian director Valentina Castellani in close collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan, the exhibition includes many works that have rarely been seen and reunites important series from public and private collections.
Fontana's fascination for the advancements of science and technology during the twentieth century led him to approach art as a series of investigations into a wide variety of mediums and methods. As a sculptor, he experimented with stone, metals, ceramics, and neon; as a painter he attempted to transcend the confines of the two-dimensional plane. In a series of manifestos, beginning with the Manifesto blanco (White Manifesto) of 1946, Fontana announced his goals for a "spatialist" art, one that could engage technology to achieve an expression of the fourth dimension in a radical new aesthetic idiom that melded the categories of architecture, sculpture, and painting.
A sculptor trained in classical techniques, Fontana was initially known for grand and innovative sculptures produced for trade fairs and exhibitions promoting the ideology of Fascism in Italy. But these early examples already contained a rationalist abstract language that pointed to an awareness of the most daring rationalist architectonic experiments of Edoardo Persico and Giuseppe Terragni
Upon his return to Milan from Argentina in 1947, Fontana found his studio and works completely destroyed in the Allied bombings of Milan. Due to this abrupt tabula rasa, he considered himself to belong rather to the post-war generation of Italian artists: thus the story of his career is, effectively, the story of his last twenty years. In Buenos Aires, with his students at the newly founded Academia of Altamira, Fontana conceived of an art that could reflect the excitement of contemporaneous discoveries in science and physics and thus continue evolving its very means. Inspired by, but surpassing, the language of Futurism, they advocated doing away with the traditional supports of painting and sculpture. With the act of cutting a thinly painted monochromatic canvas with a sharp knife, Fontana exploded the definition—or at least the conventional space—of art. This act challenged the entire history of Western easel painting and led him to the understanding that painting was no longer about illusion contained within the dimensions of a canvas but, rather, a dynamic concept that blended form, color, architectural space, gesture, and light. Thus the concept of spazialismo was born.
The Fall 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Andy Warhol’s Mao (1972) on the cover.
Grace Coddington, fashion editor and former creative-director-at-large for American Vogue, meets with the Quarterly’s Derek C. Blasberg to reminisce on some of her most iconic collaborations with photographers and artists.
Architect and designer Jayden Ali joins Gagosian associate director Péjú Oshin for a conversation about false notions of failure, four-day workweeks, and the connective power of building together.
Old friends chat about their love of music, nightclub paintings, life lessons from aikido, and Spencer Sweeney’s upcoming exhibition The Painted Bride, at Gagosian, New York.
The exhibition Enzo Mari, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli at the Design Museum, London, runs through September 8. Taking a cue from this major retrospective, Bartolomeo Sala delves into Mari’s practice and convictions.
The Warp of Time celebrates a hundred years of shared history between the Old Carpet Factory, a historical mansion located on the Greek island of Hydra, and Soutzoglou Carpets. Here, Salomé Gómez-Upegui interviews curator Ekaterina Juskowski about Helen Marden’s woven works within the context of the exhibition, touching upon themes of history, memory, and creative expression.
John Elderfield and Lauren Mahony of Gagosian speak with the National Gallery of Art’s Harry Cooper about the new and expanded version of Elderfield’s 1989 monograph on Helen Frankenthaler that Gagosian, in collaboration with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, will publish this summer. The conversation traces Elderfield’s long interest in Frankenthaler’s work—from his time as a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to the present—and reveals some of the new perspectives and discoveries awaiting readers.
In conjunction with the memorial service for Brice Marden held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mirabelle and Melia Marden produced a short film directed by Chiara Clemente to honor the late artist. Featuring interviews, archival photographs, and family videos, this film captures Marden’s vibrant life and enduring cultural impact.
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).
Michael Ovitz, cofounder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), looks back to 1989, the year he and the architect I. M. Pei commissioned Roy Lichtenstein to create the Bauhaus Stairway Mural for the then new CAA Building in Los Angeles. Through the experience of working with Lichtenstein, Ovitz formed a meaningful friendship with the artist.
Join Gagosian for a conversation between director, producer, and writer Sophia Heriveaux and actor, director, and writer Roger Guenveur Smith inside the exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street, at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Heriveaux and Guenveur Smith both share a personal connection to Basquiat: Heriveaux is the artist’s niece and Guenveur Smith was one of his friends and collaborators. The pair discuss Basquiat’s work and legacy, as well as his lasting impact on contemporary art and culture.
Sébastien Delot is director of conservation and collections at the Musée national Picasso–Paris and the organizer of the first retrospective to focus on Anselm Kiefer’s use of photography, which was held at Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut (Musée LaM) in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France. He recently sat down with Gagosian director of photography Joshua Chuang to discuss the exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Punctum at Gagosian, New York. Their conversation touched on Kiefer’s exploration of photography’s materials, processes, and expressive potentials, and on the alchemy of his art.