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Laws of Motion

Josh Kline, Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, Jeff Wall, Anicka Yi

January 14–March 9, 2019
San Francisco

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Josh Kline; © 2019 Rosemarie Trockel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Jeff Wall. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Josh Kline; © 2019 Rosemarie Trockel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Jeff Wall. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Josh Kline; © 2019 Rosemarie Trockel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Josh Kline; © 2019 Rosemarie Trockel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Josh Kline, © Cady Noland, © Jeff Wall, © Josh Kline. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Josh Kline, © Cady Noland, © Jeff Wall, © Josh Kline. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Jeff Wall, © Cady Noland, © Josh Kline. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Jeff Wall, © Cady Noland, © Josh Kline. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Cady Noland, © Anicka Yi, © Jeff Wall. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Cady Noland, © Anicka Yi, © Jeff Wall. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Jeff Wall, © Anicka Yi. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Jeff Wall, © Anicka Yi. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view Artwork, left to right: © Jeff Koons, © Anicka Yi. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Installation view

Artwork, left to right: © Jeff Koons, © Anicka Yi. Photo: Glen Cheriton

Works Exhibited

Anicka Yi, A Thousand Leaves, 2018 Silicone, maple, cane, Shoji paper, plexiglass, stainless steel, and LEDs, 36 × 72 × 6 inches (91.4 × 182.9 × 15.2 cm)© Anicka Yi

Anicka Yi, A Thousand Leaves, 2018

Silicone, maple, cane, Shoji paper, plexiglass, stainless steel, and LEDs, 36 × 72 × 6 inches (91.4 × 182.9 × 15.2 cm)
© Anicka Yi

Jeff Koons, New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, 1980 Two shampoo polishers, acrylic, and fluorescent lights, 56 × 22 × 15 inches (142.2 × 55.9 × 38.1 cm)© Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons, New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, 1980

Two shampoo polishers, acrylic, and fluorescent lights, 56 × 22 × 15 inches (142.2 × 55.9 × 38.1 cm)
© Jeff Koons

Jeff Wall, Men move an engine block, 2008 Gelatin silver print, 54 ½ × 69 ½ inches (138.5 × 176.5 cm)© Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall, Men move an engine block, 2008

Gelatin silver print, 54 ½ × 69 ½ inches (138.5 × 176.5 cm)
© Jeff Wall

About

I want to fuse the writing of life—the notion that all living things have their own stories, contexts, perspectives, and histories—with the study of life, which also now includes an embrace of nonhuman perspectives.
—Anicka Yi

Gagosian is pleased to present Laws of Motion, an exhibition of works by Josh Kline, Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, Jeff Wall, and Anicka Yi. Laws of Motion debuted at Gagosian Hong Kong in November, and has since been expanded with additional works by Kline, Trockel, Wall, and Yi. Its title refers to Karl Marx’s application of scientific laws to systems of capital.

Forty years ago, the art of Koons, Noland, Trockel, and Wall merged strategies of commercial display and formalism, isolating inherent social archetypes and stereotypes. Laws of Motion begins with key artworks from the 1970s that responded to a world saturated in the aesthetics and language of advertising, exploiting its techniques while making visible its latent and subconscious pull.

Koons’s paradigmatic series The New examines themes of domestic use and hygienic order, employing industrial readymades such as vacuum cleaners stacked and isolated in gleaming museum vitrines. The built-in obsolescence of domestic tools and consumer products contrasts with their aspirational qualities, raising philosophical questions of newness and desire. While Noland’s assemblage of emptied beer bottles and a discarded mailbox conjures a potent image of American male delinquency, Trockel’s sculptures—electric burners mounted on the wall or placed on plinths—reduce or elevate a central symbol of domestic life to geometric abstraction, obliquely engaging a feminist discourse.

Read more

Josh Kline, Skittles, 2014, commercial fridge, lightbox, and blended liquids in bottles, 86 ½ × 127 ½ × 41 inches (219.7 × 323.9 × 104.1 cm) © Josh Kline. Photo:  © Timothy Schenck

Laws of Motion

Catalyzed by Laws of Motion—a group exhibition pairing artworks from the 1980s on by Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeff Wall with contemporary sculptures by Josh Kline and Anicka Yi—Wyatt Allgeier discusses the convergences and divergences in these artists’ practices with an eye to the economic worlds from which they spring.

Inkjet print of Jeff Wall's "In the Legion" (2022)

Jeff Wall: In the Domain of Likeness

The Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, has staged a comprehensive Jeff Wall exhibition including more than fifty works spanning five decades. Here, Barry Schwabsky reflects on the enduring power of and mystery in Wall’s photography.

Jeff Wall at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, in front of his photography

Jeff Wall: An Exhibition Tour

Join Jeff Wall as he leads a tour through his latest exhibition in Beverly Hills. The artist speaks about the genesis and creation of each photograph, addressing the aesthetic decisions involved.

Jeff Wall, Low tide gull shadow, 2020, inkjet print, 23 x 26 inches (58.5 x 66 cm)

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.

Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), 1992, transparency in lightbox, 90 ⅛ × 164 ⅛ inches (229 × 417 cm)

Death Valley ’89: Jeff Wall vs. Photography

Daniel Spaulding considers formal and technical developments in the photographer’s work against the background of global shifts of power and politics, specifically the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The cover of the Fall 2019 Gagosian Quarterly magazine. Artwork by Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2019

The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.

News

Photo: Andrew Querner

Artist Spotlight

Jeff Wall

November 18–24, 2020

From his pioneering use of backlit color transparencies in the 1970s to his intricately staged scenes of enigmatic incidents from daily life, literature, and film, Jeff Wall has expanded the definition of the photograph, both as object and as illusion. His pictures range from classical reportage and the direct contemplation of natural forms to elaborate constructions and montages, usually produced at a large scale traditionally identified with painting.

Photo: Andrew Querner