Extended through June 27, 2020
About
For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Gagosian is pleased to present Duino Elegies, a group exhibition that traces the resonance of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry through artworks spanning the past 150 years.
In 1912, Rilke was invited to stay at Duino Castle—a fortress just north of Trieste, Italy—by the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. There, while standing atop a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, he claimed to hear the following line: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” Rilke eventually used these words to open the Duino Elegies, a 1923 collection of ten intensely religious metaphysical poems. Concerned with the interplay of suffering and beauty in human existence, the Elegies also project a hopeful vision of a more peaceful world.
Two decades earlier, Rilke had moved to Paris to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin, initiating a complex but lasting friendship between the two men. Rilke venerated the sculptor’s ability to translate poetic sentiments into figuration, as exemplified by Rodin’s large bronze La Muse tragique (1896). Originally conceived seven years prior for the Monument to Victor Hugo—in which the muse, perched above the French literary giant, whispers inspiration to him—La Muse tragique is presented here as a single figure, evoking a heightened pathos befitting its subject’s symbolic identity.
#DuinoElegies
Artists
Balthus
Paul Cézanne
Edmund de Waal
Anselm Kiefer
Auguste Rodin
Medardo Rosso
Cy Twombly
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Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies
Bobbie Sheng explores the symbiotic relationship between the poet and visual artists of his time and tracks the enduring influence of his poetry on artists working today.
to light, and then return—: A Night of Poetry with Edmund de Waal, Elisa Gonzalez, Terrance Hayes, and Sally Mann
Gagosian presented an evening of poetry inside to light, and then return—, an exhibition of new works by Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann, inspired by each other’s practices, at Gagosian, New York. In this video—taking the artists’ shared love of poetry, fragments, and metamorphosis as a point of departure—poets Elisa Gonzalez and Terrance Hayes read a selection of their recent works that resonate with the themes of elegy and historical reckoning in the show. The evening was moderated by Jonathan Galassi, chairman and executive editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Between Shadow and Light
Scholar and researcher Yves Guignard, who is working on Balthus’s archives for a revision of the Balthus catalogue raisonné, examines the artist’s engagement with drawing, arguing for a more concerted attention to these works than scholarship has paid them.
In Conversation
Jerome Rothenberg and Charles Bernstein
Gagosian and Beyond Baroque Literary | Arts Center hosted a conversation between poets Jerome Rothenberg and Charles Bernstein inside Anselm Kiefer’s exhibition Exodus at Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Rothenberg and Bernstein explored some of the themes that occupy Kiefer—Jewish mysticism, the poetry of Paul Celan, and the formulation of a global poetics in response to the Holocaust—in a discussion and readings of their poetry.
Axel Salto: Playing with Fire
On the occasion of the forthcoming exhibition Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto, Edmund de Waal composed a series of reflections on the Danish ceramicist Axel Salto and his own practice.
to light, and then return—Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann
This fall, artists and friends Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann will exhibit new works together in New York. Inspired by their shared love of poetry, fragments, and metamorphosis, the works included will form a dialogue between their respective practices. Here they meet to speak about the origins and developments of the project.