Installation Views

Works Exhibited

About

The critic and curator Philip Rawson, an eloquent guide to the means and methods of drawing over the ages, points out that until the Italian Quattrocento, no European sculptor was supposed to be able to draw. In the medieval period, only those sculptors who also worked in two dimensions drew habitually; any other sculptor who needed, say, to show a client a proposed design hired a draftsman to make one. And when sculptors began to make drawings (for their own use or to guide assistants), they tended to do so without thinking of the format of the paper as a frame to which the image should relate. Instead, the image was generally treated as an independent motif, composed of mutually related units and placed anywhere on the sheet. In this approach, the space of the paper outside the image was not incorporated into the design but functioned like the open, empty space around actual sculptures. . . . In contrast, Rawson observes, painters’ drawings have tended to treat the usually rectangular format of the paper as a frame to which the image content relates.
—John Elderfield

Gagosianis pleased to present Plane.Site, a cross-generational exhibition of modern and contemporary artists organized by Sam Orlofsky to inaugurate the San Francisco gallery.

Plane.Site explores the dynamic exchanges between drawing and sculpture in the work of artists from the postwar period to the present day. To that end, each participating artist is represented by works in both two and three dimensions.

In an essay accompanying the exhibition, John Elderfield observes that “Moving from the boundaries of two dimensions into free space, artists may feel an obvious thrill of escape,” while noting that there is also “the less obvious but equally liberating escape from open space, with its grip of the literal, for the spontaneity of movement and freedom of illusion attainable in the haven of the two-dimensional.” Consistent with his observation, many modern and contemporary artists have evaded the dictate of the rectangular frame, allowing the drawn line to exist on different planes, and eventually, to descend from the canvas into three dimensions. In stepping away from the drawn line on paper and into the heft and mass of three-dimensional sculpture, such artists continued to negotiate the rectangular plane, even when composing in open space.

Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze

Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze

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.

Roy Lichtenstein’s New York Boyhood

Roy Lichtenstein’s New York Boyhood

Avis Berman’s biography of Roy Lichtenstein, Becoming Roy Lichtenstein: The Path to Pop, will be published this fall by Abbeville Press, aligning with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in October. For the Quarterly she has adapted part of her text to focus on the artist’s formative experiences in New York in the 1920s and ’30s.

Jasper Johns: Between the Clock and the Bed

Jasper Johns: Between the Clock and the Bed

On January 22, Gagosian, in partnership with Castelli Gallery, opened an exhibition of historic works by Jasper Johns at the 980 Madison Avenue gallery in New York. A survey of the crosshatch paintings and drawings that dominated his practice from 1973 to 1983, the presentation united works that have rarely been seen with loans from sources including distinguished American museums. The exhibition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of this body of work’s debut at Castelli Gallery in 1976. Here, Larry Gagosian speaks with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about the impetus for this project, his memories of seeing the exhibition in 1976, and the enduring impact of these paintings on artists and collectors.

Richard Serra: Steve Reich’s “Music for Pieces of Wood”

Richard Serra: Steve Reich’s “Music for Pieces of Wood”

In this video, musical ensemble Sō Percussion performs Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood” inside the exhibition Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage), 1992, at Gagosian, New York.

Fizzles

Fizzles

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.

Tatiana Trouvé: Dead Reckoning

Tatiana Trouvé: Dead Reckoning

The Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection in Venice opened Tatiana Trouvé: The Strange Life of Things this past April. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition’s venue served as a key starting point for the creation of new sculptures, large-scale drawings, and site-specific installations, all presented in dialogue with bodies of work from the past decade. A catalogue was published alongside the exhibition, and here we share Neville Wakefield’s essay on Trouvé’s radical forms of cartography.

Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2025

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2025

The Fall 2025 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Andy Warhol’s Blue Liz as Cleopatra (1962) on the cover.

At the Movies with Andy Warhol

At the Movies with Andy Warhol

Carlos Valladares tracks the artist’s engagements with Hollywood glamour, thinking through the ways in which the star system and its marketing engine informed his work.

Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2025

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2025

The Summer 2025 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Pablo Picasso’s Nu accoudé (1961) on the cover.

Rachel Whiteread: Casting History

Rachel Whiteread: Casting History

From her Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna to her casting of George Orwell’s World War II office at the BBC, Rachel Whiteread has long engaged with the emotional and historical complexities of addressing deeply troubling moments in human history through art. This month, Whiteread will debut a new work for the inaugural exhibition at the Goodwood Art Foundation in Sussex, England.

Picasso: Tête-à-tête

Picasso: Tête-à-tête

On April 18, the exhibition Picasso: Tête-à-tête opened at Gagosian, New York. Including works from 1896 to 1972, the full span of the artist’s career, the show is presented in partnership with Paloma Picasso, the artist’s daughter. Here, Michael Cary, one of the organizers of the exhibition, traces the historical precedents that informed the conversational nature of the curation. He also introduces a translation of a 1932 interview with Picasso by the publisher and critic E. Tériade, often quoted in English in part but not in full.

Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2025

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2025

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

The World as Playground

The World as Playground

Bartolomeo Sala considers the brief yet revolutionary dreams of Arte Povera. On the occasion of a retrospective at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, he explores the historical conditions that gave rise to the radical midcentury movement and the warnings we might glean today from its legacy.

Cy Twombly by Jenny Saville: To Lift the Veil

Cy Twombly by Jenny Saville: To Lift the Veil

Jenny Saville reflects on Cy Twombly’s poetic engagement with the world, with time and tension, and with growth in this excerpt from her Marion Barthelme Lecture, presented at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 2024.

Isabelle Albuquerque × Robert Therrien

Isabelle Albuquerque × Robert Therrien

For the first time ever, the Robert Therrien Estate presents a collaborative exhibition in the artist’s Los Angeles studio. Sculptor Isabelle Albuquerque kicks off a series of shows that place noteworthy voices in dialogue with Therrien’s practice. Here, Albuquerque speaks with Dean Anes and Paul Cherwick from the estate about the collaboration.

Hidden in Plain Sight: New Discoveries in the Art of Jasper Johns, Part Two

Hidden in Plain Sight: New Discoveries in the Art of Jasper Johns, Part Two

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.

A Living Symbol

A Living Symbol

As American identity once again comes into question during a politically charged election cycle, the Quarterly revisits the motif of the American flag in art. Here, John B. Ravenal contextualizes Robert Lazzarini’s new wall-based flag sculptures and elucidates the tensions they lay bare in the symbol of our nation.

Hidden in Plain Sight: New Discoveries in the Art of Jasper Johns

Hidden in Plain Sight: New Discoveries in the Art of Jasper Johns

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

Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2024

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2024

The Fall 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Andy Warhol’s Mao (1972) on the cover.

Mao: In the Land of Warhol

Mao: In the Land of Warhol

Jessica Beck examines Andy Warhol’s return to painting in the 1970s, focusing on the artist’s Mao series.