Extended through September 17, 2016
Installation view
Photo: Zarko Vijatovic
Installation view
Photo: Zarko Vijatovic
Installation view
Photo: Zarko Vijatovic
Installation view
Photo: Zarko Vijatovic
Installation view
Photo: Zarko Vijatovic
Albert Oehlen
I 11, 2009
Paper on canvas, 66 ⅞ × 90 ½ inches (170 × 230 cm)
© Albert Oehlen
Nam June Paik
Untitled, 1998
Acrylic on canvas, 67 × 46 inches (170.2 × 116.8 cm)
© Nam June Paik Estate. Photo: Ben Blackwell
Richard Prince
Untitled (Joke), 2011
Inkjet print on canvas, 58 × 78 ¾ inches (147.3 × 200 cm)
© Richard Prince. Photo: Rob McKeever
Ed Ruscha
A, 1985–87
Acrylic on canvas, in 3 parts, each: 66 ¼ × 137 ¼ inches (168.3 × 348.6 cm)
© Ed Ruscha. Photo: Paul Ruscha
Words have these abstract shapes, they live in a world of no size.
—Ed Ruscha
Gagosian is pleased to present LEXICON, an exhibition of artworks that employ the written word.
A lexicon is a stock or inventory of systematized language, whether personal or belonging to a larger cultural context, which can be shared and deployed. Since the beginning of recorded history, language and art have collided and intersected. And from the modern era onward, artists have employed words and language to diverse effect, using writing as both act and subject—in print, light, sculpture, and paint on canvas. Works in the exhibition include Marcel Broodthaers’s Académie I (1968); Alighiero Boetti’s embroidered magic word squares (Arazzi) (1977–92); Ed Ruscha’s large-scale three-part painting A, B, C (1985–87); Jenny Holzer’s stone agit, Selections from the Living Series (Bench #9) (1989); Douglas Gordon’s text work for a television monitor, A moment’s silence (for someone close to you) (1998); Jean-Michel Basquiat’s cultural cryptograms; and Cy Twombly’s abstruse and airy scratchings. Lawrence Weiner has created a new site-responsive version of AT THE SAME MOMENT (2000) for the rue de Ponthieu gallery, and Piero Golia has designed a printed wallpaper especially for the exhibition.
Language and art have never lived too far away from one another: concrete poetry, propaganda, graffiti, and Pop art, among other genres, testify to their dynamic interplay over time. LEXICON presents works by artists who have made language and letters into what poet William Carlos Williams would have referred to as “the thing itself”: language becoming physical object.
The exhibition will include works by Carl Andre, Giovanni Anselmo, Julien Audebert, Robert Barry, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alighiero Boetti, Joe Bradley, Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Filliou, John Giorno, Robert Gober, Piero Golia, Douglas Gordon, Loris Gréaud, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Emilio Isgrò, Neil Jenney, Jasper Johns, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Kruger, Claude Lévêque, Glenn Ligon, Adam McEwen, Sarah Morris, Albert Oehlen, Nam June Paik, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly, and Lawrence Weiner.
The Spring 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available with a fresh cover design featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Lead Plate with Hole (1984).
On the occasion of Douglas Gordon: All I need is a little bit of everything, an exhibition in London, curator Adam Szymczyk recounts his experiences with Gordon’s work across nearly three decades, noting the continuities and evolutions.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, met with filmmaker Tamra Davis, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and author and curator Fred Hoffman to reflect on their experiences with the artist during the 1980s in Los Angeles.
Douglas Gordon took over the Piccadilly Lights advertising screen in London’s Piccadilly Circus, as well as a global network of screens in cities including Berlin, Melbourne, Milan, New York, and Seoul, nightly for three minutes at 20:22 (8:22pm) throughout December 2022, with his new film, if when why what (2018–22). The project was presented by the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (CIRCA) in conjunction with the exhibition Douglas Gordon: Neon Ark at Gagosian, Davies Street, London.
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 conjunction with his exhibitions Adam McEwen at Gagosian in London, and Adam McEwen: XXIII at Gagosian in Rome, the artist sits down with author Ian Penman to discuss his new obituary works and graphite sculptures.
Ester Coen meditates on the dynamism of Sterling Ruby’s recent projects, tracing parallels between these works and the histories of Futurism, Constructivism, and the avant-garde.
Contemporary artists Adam McEwen and Jeremy Deller met up online over the holiday season to discuss McEwen’s upcoming exhibitions in London and Rome. McEwen delves into the motivations and criteria behind his work, as well as the challenges and complexities of memorializing the living.
Join Sterling Ruby in his Los Angeles studio as he works on new abstract paintings ahead of his exhibition TURBINES at Gagosian in New York.
In conversation with James Fox, Damien Hirst reflects on the artwork of his longtime friend.
Eleonora Di Erasmo, cocurator of Un/veiled: Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations, a program of concerts, video screenings, and works by Cy Twombly at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome, reflects on the resonances and networks of inspiration between the artist and music. The program was the result of an extensive three-year study, done at the behest of Nicola Del Roscio in the Rome and Gaeta offices of the Cy Twombly Foundation, intended to collect, document, and preserve compositions by musicians around the world who have been inspired by Twombly’s work, or to establish an artistic dialogue with them.
Gillian Pistell writes on the loaded symbol of the American flag in the work of postwar and contemporary artists.
In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced their plan for a survey of Cy Twombly’s artwork alongside selections from their permanent ancient Greek and Roman collection. The survey was postponed due to the lockdowns necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, but was revived in 2022 with a presentation at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from August 2 through October 30. In 2023, the exhibition will arrive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The curator for the exhibition, Christine Kondoleon, and Kate Nesin, author of Cy Twombly’s Things (2014) and advisor for the show, speak with Gagosian director Mark Francis about the origin of the exhibition and the aesthetic and poetic resonances that give the show its title: Making Past Present.
On the occasion of Nam June Paik: Art in Process: Part One, curator John G. Hanhardt and Nam June Paik Estate curator Jon Huffman discuss the survey of works spanning the artist’s career.
On the occasion of Neil Jenney: AMERICAN REALISM TODAY, the artist sat down with Gagosian curator Michael Cary to discuss paintings from Jenney’s recent series Modern Africa (2015–)—a subseries of the New Good Paintings (2015–)—and the preceding series, Good Paintings (1971–2015).
The second installment of Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, presents author Percival Everett’s novella Grand Canyon, Inc. alongside Untitled (Original Cowboy), a photograph by Richard Prince. In celebration of the publication, Everett met with author Brandon Taylor to discuss the novella, the role of history in the writing process, and the similarity in methodologies for science and literature.
Thierry Greub tracks the literary references in Cy Twombly’s epic painting of 1994.
Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, spoke with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald ahead of the opening of the unprecedented collaborative retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror to discuss the goals, revelations, and unique structure of the project.
The Fall 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Damien Hirst’s Reclining Woman (2011) on its cover.
The artist speaks with Mark Godfrey about his new paintings, touching on the works’ relationship to John Graham, the Rothko Chapel, and Leigh Bowery.
