About
Realism is best suited to convey the frightening idiosyncrasies of our time.
—Duane Hanson
A picture is something that makes invisible its before and after.
—Jeff Wall
Gagosian is pleased to present I Don’t Like Fiction, I Like History, with works by Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky, Duane Hanson, Sharon Lockhart, and Jeff Wall.
Using the pictorial languages of realism and illusion, the participating artists turn fragments of everyday life into legible narratives. Duane Hanson’s ensemble of construction workers at rest, Lunchbreak (1989), and a figure modeled after his own child in a quiet moment, Child with Puzzle (1978), are installed with photographic works that both reflect and complicate ideas of recorded reality and subjective, constructed composition.
Hanson’s hyperreal human figures, often in mundane situations, have been compared to Pop and to Photorealism; instantly and innately familiar, they come as close to photography as three-dimensional sculpture can. Yet in their verisimilitude, these effigies of house painters, janitors, security workers, and tourists evoke the intuitive pathos of confronting another human being. Working against the dominant trends of abstraction and Minimalism at the beginning of his career in the 1950s and ’60s, Hanson eschewed pure formalism, as the sociological aspect of art making became palpable in his work through his concentration on the bare life of his subjects. Some sculptures, such as that of a museum guard installed within a museum exhibition, deconstruct the “fourth wall” between artworks and viewer, making visceral a normally safe, insulated encounter.
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Unreal Americans
Benjamin Nugent reflects on questions of verisimilitude and American life in the group exhibition I Don’t Like Fiction, I Like History at Gagosian, Beverly Hills.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2022
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).

Andreas Gursky
On the occasion of an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, from May 5 to June 18, 2022, Max Dax met with Andreas Gursky to speak with the photographer about his new work. Here, they discuss the consequences of the pandemic on certain works, the roles of techno music and art history in Gursky’s art process, and the necessary balance of beauty and honesty in the contemporary.

Ive by Gursky: A Meeting of Minds
By exploring the conventions of past portraits of industrial designers and architects, Maria Morris Hambourg unpacks Andreas Gursky’s ingenious recent portrait of Apple designer Jony Ive to reveal its layered meanings.

Donald Marron
Jacoba Urist profiles the legendary collector.

In Conversation
Jeff Wall and Gary Dufour
Jeff Wall speaks to Gary Dufour about his new photographs, made on the beachfront of English Bay in Vancouver, Canada, that record the endlessly varied and shifting patterns created in seaweed by the ebb and flow of the tide.