Beginning

The exhibition is about walking, crossing, looking, sleeping, fearing, and dying, but it also reminds us that every time we walk, cross, look, sleep, fear, or die, we have the chance to begin again.
—Francesco Bonami

Gagosian is pleased to present Beginning, an exhibition of painting, installation, and photography by Maurizio Cattelan, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Richard Prince, and Rudolf Stingel, curated by Francesco Bonami.

Juxtaposing four key contemporary works in a spare, contemplative arrangement inspired by a 1994 exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres’s and Stingel’s work at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria, Beginning considers the impact of recent traumatic world events on our collective perception of art and culture. Reflecting a pervasive sense of mourning—and, crucially, a resilient spirit of hope—in the face of death and disaster, it invites quiet, sustained meditation on the often painful process of transition from one state of being to another.

In Cattelan’s mural Father (2021), a colossal black-and-white representation of the artist’s bare feet looms over the gallery interior. Its title alludes to the artist’s complex relationship with his own parent, while the image recalls Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1483)—as well as widely circulated images of the feet of executed guerilla leader Che Guevara. It also harks back to Cattelan’s Daddy, Daddy (2008), a sculpture of the hero of Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) that was first installed facedown in the fountain at the base of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda as part of the exhibition theanyspacewhatever (2008–09) as if having fallen to his death, any filial cry for help having gone unheeded. Father conveys Hamlet’s ultimate dilemma—“to die, to sleep”—a choice between the avoidance of violent reality and the risk of succumbing to it.