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.