Le Jardin Décomposé
Choreographer Benjamin Pech’s danseur étoile, an original ballet composed for the group exhibition Le Jardin Décomposé.
Extended through February 28, 2015
By nature the Third Landscape constitutes a territory for the multitude of species not finding place elsewhere.
—Gilles Clément
Gagosian Paris is pleased to present Le Jardin Décomposé / Decomposed Garden. The exhibition features works by Chris Burden, Maurizio Cattelan, Dan Colen, Michael Craig-Martin, Urs Fischer, Carsten Höller, Jeff Koons, Giuseppe Penone, Richard Prince, Robert Therrien, Franz West, and Zeng Fanzhi.
Comprising more than twenty monumental sculptures and paintings, Le Jardin Décomposé evokes an overlapping of city and nature, a place akin to botanist and writer Gilles Clément’s characterization of the Third Landscape as “the space left over by man to landscape evolution—to nature alone.” Clément places swamps, roadsides, railroad embankments, and other peripheral spaces within a category of “genetic reservoirs” where unattended plant life mixes with the urban environment and its detritus, sometimes to extraordinary effect. Works such as Richard Prince’s Untitled (tire planter) (2007), a bright-orange, tire-shaped vessel containing a tuft of weeds, and Carsten Höller’s Giant Triple Mushroom (2014), a mixed-media fungal hybrid created for this exhibition, allude to the gradual commingling that might take place in such forgotten terrain. Tenuously merging human and natural imagery in Waterfall Dots (Tree Rocks) (2008), Jeff Koons employs an oscillating visual field and anatomical overdrawing, revisiting Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, where an idyllic landscape is the backdrop for a disturbing naked female body. In Holmby Hills Light Folly (2012), Chris Burden designates an incongruous yet inviting park square with cast-iron benches and lampposts.
In the Third Landscape, nature that has been displaced by industrial development adapts in improbable ways; replication and exaggeration of growth patterns lead to radiant dimensions. Giuseppe Penone’s Scrigno (Casket) (2007) is a patchwork mural of overlapping sections of weathered brown leather; moving around a living tree, he hammered the leather against it to impress the bark’s natural pattern and texture into the yielding membrane. Across the center of this vast work, which measures approximately fifteen meters wide, lies a small tree cast in bronze, split open to reveal its rich resin interior. Franz West’s bright-blue aluminum Garden Pouf (2010) is a treelike abstraction that zigzags more than four meters in the air, while in Zeng Fanzhi’s ominous landscape painting Untitled (2012), gnarled branches crisscross the lower registers of a nocturnal scene that combines controlled calligraphic techniques and supernatural light effects.
On October 25 at 2pm, dancers Raphaëlle Delaunay, Benjamin Pech, and Alice Renevand will perform an original ballet choreographed by Pech, étoile dancer at the Ballet de l’Opera National de Paris, to compositions by Claude Debussy, Antonio Vivaldi, and contemporary composer Emanuele De Raymondi.
Choreographer Benjamin Pech’s danseur étoile, an original ballet composed for the group exhibition Le Jardin Décomposé.
Curated by Francesco Bonami, Sunday is the first solo presentation of new work by Maurizio Cattelan in New York in over twenty years. Here, Bonami asks us to consider Cattelan as a political artist, detailing the potent and clear observations at the core of these works.
In conjunction with Franz West: Papier, the gallery’s presentation of paper-based works by Franz West at Frieze Masters 2023, artist Oscar Murillo and arts writer, critic, and broadcaster Ben Luke sit down to discuss Murillo’s collaboration in selecting the works on view, as well as his personal experiences meeting the late artist in London.
In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.
Philosopher Federico Campagna and artist Carsten Höller came together, on the heels of Höller’s exhibition Clocks in Paris, to consider the measurement of time, the problem with fun, and the fine line between mysticism and nihilism.
The Spring 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Roe Ethridge’s Two Kittens with Yarn Ball (2017–22) on its cover.
In this interview, curator and artist K.O. Nnamdie speaks with artist Dan Colen about his recent show in New York: Lover, Lover, Lover. Colen delves into the concept of “home” as it relates to his work, specifically the Mother and Woodworker series. Thinking through the political and historical implications of “homeland” in the context of the artist’s relationship with Israel and America, the two consider the intersections between these paintings—the final group of his Disney-inspired canvases—and Colen’s work with Sky High Farm, New York.
The Winter 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Anna Weyant’s Two Eileens (2022) on its cover.
Urs Fischer sits down with his friend the author and artist Eric Sanders to address the perfect viewer, the effects of marketing, and the limits of human understanding.
In this video, Deana Haggag, program officer, Arts and Culture at Mellon Foundation; Dan Colen, artist and founder of Sky High Farm; Linda Goode Bryant, artist and founder of Project EATS; and Diya Vij, curator at Creative Time sit down together to explore the roles of artist and audience, place and accessibility, legacy, capital influence, and individual vs. collective agency as they relate to artmaking today.
In this video, Thelma Golden, chief curator and director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Tremaine Emory, founder of Denim Tears and creative director of Supreme; Father Mike Lopez, founder of the Hungry Monk Rescue Truck; and artist Anicka Yi sit down to explore how the concept of community has shaped their work, and the power in seeing the places we live, our histories, and even our bodies as porous, interdependent, and alive.
In this video, Veronica Davidov, visual and environmental anthropologist; Karen Washington, activist, farmer and co-founder of Black Urban Growers (BUGS) and co-owner of Rise & Root Farm; Candice Hopkins, curator, writer and executive director of Forge Project; and Haley Mellin, artist, conservationist and founder of Art to Acres sit down to explore the tensions and overlaps between different efforts to define, use, and protect land.
Michael Craig-Martin and Jan Dalley sat down together in London as part of this year’s FT Weekend Festival. Join the two for a conversation about the artist’s long career in art, teaching, and writing, as well as his latest projects. A principal figure of British Conceptual art, Craig-Martin probes the relationship between objects and images, harnessing the human capacity to imagine absent forms through symbols and pictures.
The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.
Le Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, in Éveux, France, is both an active Dominican priory and the last building designed by Le Corbusier. As a result, the priory, completed in 1961, is a center both religious and architectural, a site of spiritual significance and a magnetic draw for artists, writers, architects, and others. This fall, at the invitation of Frère Marc Chauveau, Giuseppe Penone will be exhibiting a selection of existing sculptures at La Tourette alongside new work directly inspired by the context and materials of the building. Here, Penone and Frère Chauveau discuss the power and peculiarities of the space, as well as the artwork that will be exhibited there.
This spring, Carsten Höller launched Brutalisten, a new restaurant concept in Stockholm and the latest embodiment of his long-term culinary and artistic project called the Brutalist Kitchen. The twenty-eight-seat restaurant features a menu overseen by chef Stefan Eriksson that adheres to three classifications: “semi-brutalist” dishes (using oil or minimal ingredients), “brutalist” dishes (using salt and water), and “orthodox-brutalist” dishes (no additional ingredients). For the Quarterly, Höller speaks with Gagosian directors Serena Cattaneo Adorno and Mark Francis about this terminology, the importance of experimentation, and the fortuitous side effects of brutalist cuisine.
Join Gagosian to celebrate the publication of Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden with a conversation between American Artist, Yayoi Shionoiri, and Sydney Stutterheim presented at the Kitchen, New York. Considering the book’s sustained examination of sixty-seven projects that remained incomplete at the time of Burden’s death in 2015, the trio discuss the various ways that an artist’s work and legacy live on beyond their lifetime.
The exhibition Urs Fischer: Lovers at Museo Jumex, Mexico City, brings together works from international public and private collections as well as from the artist’s own archive, alongside new pieces made especially for the exhibition. To mark this momentous twenty-year survey, the artist sits down with the exhibition’s curator, Francesco Bonami, to discuss the installation.
Michael Auping tells the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about the preparations for a performance by Chris Burden at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Southern California in 1974—and the event’s abrupt cancellation—providing a glimpse into the mindset of a young, aggressive, and ambitious artist in the early stages of his career.
The Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, with two different covers—featuring Takashi Murakami’s 108 Bonnō MURAKAMI.FLOWERS (2022) and Andreas Gursky’s V & R II (2022).