
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.
Due to digital photography, the negative, which I have used nearly every day for more than twenty-five years, has almost disappeared. If I ask my daughters what a negative is, they look at me wide-eyed, for they've never seen or used one. The negative was actually never considered for itself, it was always only a means to an end. It was the “master” from which the photographic print was made, and I think it is worth looking at these “masters.”
—Thomas Ruff
Gagosian London is pleased to present recent work by Thomas Ruff.
Ruff is a leading innovator in the generation of German artists that propelled photography into mainstream art. Open and explorative, he has pushed the limits of the medium, harnessing technologies both old and new—including night vision, hand-tinting, and stereoscopy—to reconceptualize architectural, astrological, pornographic, and portrait photography. In the objective tradition of his former professors Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ruff's deadpan Portraits are characterized by a startling level of legibility; while in the ma.r.s. series, he amplified black-and-white NASA reconnaissance images with 3-D rendering and saturated color. In recent works, he has engaged the photogram, the camera-less technique advanced by Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy and others during the early twentieth century; and the visual and evocative properties of the photographic negative.
Ruff's recent negatives extend his explorations of the photogram, in which he used positive and negative imagery to create a mesmerizing photographic world of nebulous shadows, spheres, zigzags, and hard edges against richly colored backgrounds. Reversing the negative's role as a means to an end—the master image from which the print is created—he digitally transforms sepia-toned albumen prints into dramatically contrasting apparitions. The size of the prints—29 x 22 centimeters—roughly corresponds to the scale of the glass plates that could be exposed with a large camera during the nineteenth century. In the negatives shown at Gagosian Beverly Hills in 2014, Ruff portrayed posed nude subjects with white marble skin tones; in new works he imbues plants with sculptural dimensionality, heightening the form and character of each specimen. Reduced to a white silhouette, a vase of lilies resembles rising smoke; the bright puff of a drooping hydrangea is a focal point among hazy grey tones. Revisiting historical techniques to invent meta-photographic genres, Ruff continues to expand the subjects, possibilities, and appearance of images.

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.

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.

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.