Extended through January 10, 2015
Installation video
Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever
Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever
Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever
Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever
Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever
Blair Thurman
DEAD POOL, 2014
Acrylic on canvas on wood, 76 ½ × 46 × 4 inches (194.3 × 116.8 × 10.2 cm)
Photo by Rob McKeever
Blair Thurman
STPTS, 2014
Acrylic on canvas on wood, 73 X 46 ½ X 4 inches (185.4 X 118.1 × 10.2 cm)
Photo by Rob McKeever
Blair Thurman
Wax Figure (Ickarusty), 2014
Acrylic on canvas on wood, 85 × 46 ¼ × 2 inches (215.9 × 117.5 × 5.1 cm)
Photo by Rob McKeever
Blair Thurman
Limerocker, 2014
Acrylic on canvas on wood (possiby with chains), 72 ¾ × 40 × 3 ½ inches (184.8 × 101.6 × 8.9 cm)
Photo by Rob McKeever
Blair Thurman
Big Karma (Bizzarini Red), 2014
Acrylic on canvas on wood, 100 × 53 × 3 inches (254 × 134.6 × 12.7 cm)
Photo by Rob McKeever
Blair Thurman
Sashimi Satans, 2014
Acrylic on shaped canvas, 93 × 24 inches (236.2 × 61 cm)
Photo by Rob McKeever
Blair Thurman
God Barn (Temple of the Body), 2014
Acrylic on canvas on wood in 5 parts, 101 × 107 × 4 inches overall (256.5 × 271.8 × 10.2 cm)
Photo by Rob McKeever
Blair Thurman, a Pop Sensitive, and his work, a haphazard reclaiming of the “Look of Kool.” His method is gaze and memory rather than cold analysis. More like the free associations of a Beat poet on the road, happening upon Gonzo situations and structures, awash in neon, remembering a childhood of Hot-Wheels and model-glue, suspended in a haze of martinis, coffee, pain-killers, anti-histamine & Thera-Flu…The road as abstraction. Thurman turns the road on edge. Thurman recognizes the art [of the road] and transforms the idea into a painting…An obsessive action driven by obsessive collecting. The aesthetics of punk underground trash…a tube of Testors in each nostril…hurtling through space. The loner as Silver Surfer confronting the post-punk existential. For me the creature is our darker nature…our subjective selves. The dark self on the road to nowhere.
—Steven Parrino, 2003
Gagosian New York is pleased to present recent work by Blair Thurman, his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
As a boy in the 1960s, Thurman spent afternoons at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where his mother was director. Something of a mascot, he spent his childhood looking up to figures such as Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Carl Andre, and Ed Kienholz—openings, installations, a literal behind-the-scenes education. As an art student in the 1980s, he sought to escape prevailing theoretical concerns. In search of “pre-art school” points of departure, Thurman revisited his childhood infatuation with slot cars: “They were in their heyday and I had an amazing collection of Hot Wheels, which were innovative and painted with an amazing paint called Spectraflame.” He recalls wanting the subject matter or content of art to have as deep a personal connection as its formal aspects.
Thurman combines this personal iconography with an acute awareness of the inherent challenges of painting, resulting in a Pop-Minimalist sensibility infused with tribal patterns and American car culture. As on the open road, associations come and go, and the destination depends on the viewer. Titles—Scarsdale 500; Horton Hears a Hoo Hoo; Coppertone Glam (all 2014)—reveal the extent of his eccentric reconfigurations of each subject. You Only Live Twice (2014), a rectangular painting based on the shape of Thurman's own business card, riffs on the speedway and the floating mat with four precisely cut decals framing open voids. The surface is painted with Silver Lilac Poly car lacquer, a special paint option for the 1962 Chrysler Imperial.
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.
