Installation Views

Works Exhibited

About

The home is a relationship between space and time. Time is the creator and destructor of space. Space is not autonomous and static. Space is controlled by time.
—Mario Merz

Gagosian Paris is pleased to present a selection of works by Mario Merz. Merz's work was first shown at Gagosian London in 2006.

Merz was a key member of Arte Povera, the post-war Italian movement predicated on elemental and quotidian materials which Germano Celant introduced with the historic exhibition “Arte Povera: IM Spazio” in 1967. He often combined canvases and found objects with standard neon tubes to mark the moment when materials meet: the ecstatic act of artistic production. Beams of white light seem to pass through Impermeabile / Raincoat (1967), the wall-mounted sculpture that is an early example of Merz’s innovative combining of neon with common objects; or painted canvases, as in I giganti boscaiuoli / The Giant Woodsmen (1981–82), the first in a series of large-scale, mixed-media paintings from the early 1980s. On the unstretched canvas, two cones spiral into the peak of a mountainous black triangle, while the legs of two figures, truncated by the top of the painting, walk across this central point of contact. In the dream-like montage, personal themes and symbols meet Futurist evocations of power and speed. Echoing the propulsive force of the cones, a neon tube forming a bright white vector passes through both the canvas and the third dimension.

In addition to the everyday materials that shaped his ethos, Merz's leitmotif was the igloo, representing the ideal organic shape—"both a world and a small house.” Consistent with the culture and technology of nomadic structures built with resources at hand, Merz made his igloos from earth, cloth, putty, fruit, wax, wood, glass, and animal parts. Despite the visual touchstones—the domed roof and organic components—any resemblance to functional huts or insulated ice houses ends here. Igloo (2002) is comprised of large, overlapping stone fragments, held together by industrial clamps. Through the gaps between shards, the metal framework is visible from all angles: it is a space that is discrete yet visually accessible in its adaptation of vernacular architecture. Igloo inverts the traditional structure on which it is based both literally and conceptually, transforming a resilient shelter into a precarious sculpture.

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.

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.

Peter Hujar & Paul Thek

The Art of Biography
Peter Hujar & Paul Thek

Andrew Durbin’s dual biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, tracks the convergences and divergences in the lives of the two artists, from their first meeting in Coral Cables, Florida, in 1956 through their generative romantic and creative partnership in New York, Italy, Fire Island, and beyond. Ahead of the release, Durbin met with the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to speak about the development of the project, the sublime noncompliance of these two artists, and the motifs of love, death, and rebirth that weave through the telling of their story.