
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.
Extended through January 11, 2014
It is a drawing line really. I would never have done that if I hadn't been interested in drawing lines. . .
—David Smith
Gagosian New York is pleased to announce an exhibition of David Smith’s Forgings, the groundbreaking series of industrially forged steel sculptures that the artist produced in 1955 and 1956. This is the ninth exhibition of Smith’s work to be presented by Gagosian in collaboration with the Estate of David Smith. Focusing on a pivotal aspect of Smith’s celebrated achievement, this is the first time that all ten 1955 Forgings have been on view together since 1956.
Smith was a pioneer of sculptural welding technique, with which he created a diverse body of work ranging from pure abstraction to evocative figurative constructions. His expansive identity, specific embrace of the modern industrial context for his art, as well as his synthesis of Modernist European influences, contributed to the broad understanding of Smith’s works as the sculptural counterpoints to Abstract Expressionist painting, and to his recognition as one of the preeminent sculptors of the twentieth century. With a particularly American combination of straightforward industry and individual expression, Smith’s Forgings give form to a crucial moment in the history of sculpture. Such works bridge the intense humanism and poetics of Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi to the industrial clarity and grandeur of Donald Judd and Richard Serra.
Smith saw drawing as the most immediate artistic expression, and he continued to paint throughout his life. In his sculpture, he took a direct approach to materials. Aligned with the painters of his time, Smith prioritized the authenticity of gesture and the visual experience of the observer. With the Forgings, he clearly and directly distilled the shared concerns of sculpture and drawing. During his time as a visiting artist at the University of Indiana, with the use of a power forge operated by LeRoy Borton at an industrial factory in Bloomington, Smith translated the spontaneity of a brushed line drawing into sculptural form, manipulating thin steel bars to achieve expressive vertical abstractions. To create the Forgings, he cut, plugged, flattened, pinched and bent each steel bar, later polishing, rusting, painting, lacquering or waxing its surface, but never compromising its vertical simplicity. The Forgings were unprecedented as works created solely through an industrial machined process, but were perhaps even more radical as pre-Minimalist forms intended to provoke discrete responses in each viewer. Each Forging is inscribed IND, alluding to Indiana, its place of origin and of Smith’s birth.

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.