Installation Views

Works Exhibited

About

Gagosian is pleased to present An Ideal Landscape, a group exhibition exploring contemporary approaches to the depiction of place.

Throughout the history of art, landscape painting has functioned as an important locus of visual symbolism. By situating classical allegories in idyllic pastoral settings, for example, seventeenth-century European artists such as Annibale Carracci and Nicolas Poussin were able to present an idealized view of the world that provided visual theater while also reflecting cultural mores. An Ideal Landscape takes a parallel yet converse approach for our times, presenting the genre as a vehicle for critique of the flawed and fraught social and political landscapes of today’s world.

Some works on view, such as Helen Frankenthaler’s luminous Peacock Alley (1990), conceive landscape as atmospheric abstraction, while others present imagined locations that capture their creators’ longing for alternative yet elusive states of being. Some artists literally incorporate elements of real environments to explore formal concerns relating to composition, medium, and color. Combining both new industrial materials and salvaged fragments from roofs that once sheltered human life, the scarred skyline of Theaster Gates’s suggestively titled Red City (2020) evokes the grit and precarity of urban existence. In the sunset scene of Light on the Mountain (2020), Jennifer Guidi takes a similarly unorthodox material approach; she incorporates sand into her oil paints, allowing her to make dimensional, mandala-like marks across the surface of her canvas in an exploration of the mystical and the meditative. Despite their vastly different methods and philosophies, the artists featured in An Ideal Landscape are united by a shared desire not only to portray the lived world—but also to reshape it.

The exhibition includes works by Georg Baselitz, Urs Fischer, Walton Ford, Helen Frankenthaler, Theaster Gates, Jennifer Guidi, Neil Jenney, Adam McEwen, Albert Oehlen, Ed Ruscha, Mary Weatherford, and Jonas Wood.

#IdealLandscape
Georg Baselitz and the Possibilities of Print

Georg Baselitz and the Possibilities of Print

On the occasion of Baselitz: AVANTI! at the Museo Novecento in Florence, Italy, Holly EJ Black considers the roots and reverberations of Georg Baselitz’s printmaking.

Ed Ruscha and Erling Kagge: Silence, Slowness, Exploration

Ed Ruscha and Erling Kagge: Silence, Slowness, Exploration

Ed Ruscha sits down with the author and explorer Erling Kagge to discuss existence.

Theaster Gates: Dave, All My Relations

Theaster Gates: Dave, All My Relations

A conversation between Theaster Gates and Jessica Bell Brown, with an introduction by Sydney Stutterheim.

Mary Weatherford and Mark Lee: Persephone

In Conversation
Mary Weatherford and Mark Lee: Persephone

Ahead of Persephone, an exhibition of new paintings by Mary Weatherford inside Hong Kong’s historic Pedder Building, the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier met with Weatherford and the architect Mark Lee to talk about their collaboration. Here, they discuss how custom architectural interventions—from mirrored columns to strategic light play—transform the gallery, evoking Persephone’s mythic journey through the underworld and back into the light of spring.

Jonas Wood: The Rules of the Game

Jonas Wood: The Rules of the Game

Following a recent visit to Jonas Wood’s Los Angeles studio, Justin Beal thinks through the artist’s paintings of tennis courts—the subject of an exhibition at Gagosian, Beverly Hills—examining their relation to the game, color theory, and the rewards of practice.

The Bad Ones Don’t Deserve It

The Bad Ones Don’t Deserve It

Albert Oehlen in conversation with Max Dax.

On Willem de Kooning: Albert Oehlen In Conversation with John Corbett

On Willem de Kooning: Albert Oehlen In Conversation with John Corbett

On the occasion of Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting, curated by Cecilia Alemani and comprising paintings from 1944 through 1986 and two sculptures, the Quarterly revisits a conversation between Albert Oehlen and John Corbett from 2013. The pair reflect on de Kooning’s late work and its lasting influence on them.

Walton Ford: La Marchesa

Behind the Art
Walton Ford: La Marchesa

Walton Ford’s exhibition Tutto opens on March 6, 2025, at Gagosian, New York. Here, the artist reflects on the life and passions of Marchesa Luisa Casati, the twentieth-century muse and patron of the arts.

Urs Fischer and Róisín Tapponi

In Conversation
Urs Fischer and Róisín Tapponi

Gagosian and Sadie Coles HQ hosted a conversation between Urs Fischer and film curator and writer Róisín Tapponi about fearless creativity and the artist’s most recent monograph, Urs Fischer: Monumental Sculpture.

In the Studio: Jonas Wood

In the Studio: Jonas Wood

Eli Diner visits Jonas Wood in his Los Angeles studio as the artist prepares for an exhibition of new paintings in London.

Transferring the Energy: Theaster Gates

Transferring the Energy: Theaster Gates

Writer and curator Olivia Anani met Theaster Gates in his exhibition Black Mystic at Gagosian, Le Bourget, to discuss the importance of translation and relocation, the ever-expanding horizons of his practice, and his use of tar.

Picture by Picture: Revisiting Frankenthaler

Picture by Picture: Revisiting Frankenthaler

John Elderfield and Lauren Mahony of Gagosian speak with the National Gallery of Art’s Harry Cooper about the new and expanded version of Elderfield’s 1989 monograph on Helen Frankenthaler that Gagosian, in collaboration with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, will publish this summer. The conversation traces Elderfield’s long interest in Frankenthaler’s work—from his time as a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to the present—and reveals some of the new perspectives and discoveries awaiting readers.

Richard Armstrong

Richard Armstrong

Richard Armstrong, director emeritus of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, joins the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald to discuss his election to the board of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, as well as the changing priorities and strategies of museums, foundations, and curators. He reflects on his various roles within museums and recounts his first meeting with Frankenthaler.

Mary Weatherford: The Flaying of Marsyas

Mary Weatherford: The Flaying of Marsyas

In conjunction with her exhibition The Flaying of Marsyas at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Mary Weatherford discusses the featured paintings, which are directly inspired by Titian’s late, eponymous masterpiece of circa 1570–76 and reflect her enduring fascination with the painting.

Urs Fischer: Wave

Urs Fischer: Wave

In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.

Georg Baselitz and Richard Calvocoressi

In Conversation
Georg Baselitz and Richard Calvocoressi

In conjunction with the exhibition The Painter in His Bed, at Gagosian, New York, Georg Baselitz and Richard Calvocoressi discuss the motif of the stag in the artist’s newest paintings.  

Jennifer Guidi: Mountain Range

Jennifer Guidi: Mountain Range

Invited to exhibit at Château La Coste in Provence, Jennifer Guidi created a new body of work that engaged with the cantilevered architecture of the gallery building, designed by Richard Rogers, and with the artistic heritage of the region. Amie Corry reports on the evolution of the exhibition and on its place within Guidi’s larger practice.

Jennifer Guidi: Mountain Range

Jennifer Guidi: Mountain Range

In this video, produced by Château La Coste, Jennifer Guidi discusses her latest solo exhibition, Mountain Range, conceived in response to the architecture of Château La Coste’s Richard Rogers Gallery and the surrounding landscape of Provence in the South of France. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Gagosian, is now on view through September 3, 2023.

Carol Armstrong and John Elderfield

In Conversation
Carol Armstrong and John Elderfield

In conjunction with the exhibition Drawing within Nature: Paintings from the 1990s at Gagosian in New York, Carol Armstrong and John Elderfield discuss Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings and large-scale works on paper dating from 1990 to 1995.

Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2022

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2022

The Winter 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Anna Weyant’s Two Eileens (2022) on its cover.