LEXICON

Helter Skelter—an exhibition at Fondazione Prada’s Venetian venue, Ca’ Corner della Regina—marks the first creative dialogue between two visionaries of American art, Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince. The show explores the grit, grift, violence, and ingenuity of American culture through more than fifty works, including photography, video, and large-scale installations that interrogate themes of race, gender, media, and politics. In the interview below, Nancy Spector, the exhibition’s curator, speaks about the shared motifs—from apocalyptic sunsets to a fascination with “monstrosity”—that led her to pair these artists for the first time.

Nearly fifty years ago, Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns met in Paris and began a collaboration on what would become Foirades/Fizzles, a deluxe limited-edition artist’s book published by Petersburg Press in 1976. Now, on the occasion of the Jasper Johns retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Gagosian Quarterly looks back to the genesis of this project with a conversation between independent researcher Anthony Atlas and Gagosian director Bob Monk. Their discussion focuses on the creative encounter between the artist and the writer and on how the book and related works became a generative source in Johns’s art.

Sydney Stutterheim traces the linkages and affinities between the work of Richard Prince and that of Bob Dylan. Using Prince’s Untitled (Dylan) as a starting point, she considers the artist’s enduring interest in questions of originality and authorship, as well as his sustained relationship with the worlds of American music and counterculture.

The Spring 2025 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Cy Twombly’s Paesaggio (1986) on the cover. 

In the second part of a two-part essay, art historian John B. Ravenal considers Jasper Johns’s continued engagement with the motif of woodgrain.

Vincent Gardner, trombonist, composer, and arranger in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, speaks about the bebop genre and Jean-Michel Basquiat with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald on the occasion of “Bebop Revolution: JLCO with Wynton Marsalis,” two nights celebrating bebop at Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York.

Jessica Beck addresses Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 trip to Italy, considering the effects of the country’s art and history on the young painter’s process and iconography. She focuses in particular on the painting Untitled (1982).

Join Gagosian for a conversation between director, producer, and writer Sophia Heriveaux and actor, director, and writer Roger Guenveur Smith inside the exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street, at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Heriveaux and Guenveur Smith both share a personal connection to Basquiat: Heriveaux is the artist’s niece and Guenveur Smith was one of his friends and collaborators. The pair discuss Basquiat’s work and legacy, as well as his lasting impact on contemporary art and culture.

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.

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.