Ruins and Fragments

Adam D. Weinberg has been working with Giuseppe Penone on an exhibition of the artist’s new sculptures, The Reflection of Bronze, that opens at Gagosian, New York, on April 22. The works explore the character and possibilities of bronze. Here, Weinberg considers Penone’s enduring engagement with the alloy and addresses the conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition’s three-room structure.

The Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection in Venice opened Tatiana Trouvé: The Strange Life of Things this past April. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition’s venue served as a key starting point for the creation of new sculptures, large-scale drawings, and site-specific installations, all presented in dialogue with bodies of work from the past decade. A catalogue was published alongside the exhibition, and here we share Neville Wakefield’s essay on Trouvé’s radical forms of cartography.

Through June 22, the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, is presenting a solo exhibition of Adriana Varejão’s work, including a new set of paintings from her Pratos (Plates) series and a site-specific outdoor sculpture. To accompany the show, Varejão has curated a selection of historical ceramic plates from the museum’s collection. Here, Louis Vaccara details the conceptual and formal references—and evolutions—in these works.

Bartolomeo Sala considers the brief yet revolutionary dreams of Arte Povera. On the occasion of a retrospective at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, he explores the historical conditions that gave rise to the radical midcentury movement and the warnings we might glean today from its legacy.

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.

Francine Prose ruminates on temporality, fragility, and strength following a visit to Sarah Sze’s exhibition Timelapse at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Douglas Gordon took over the Piccadilly Lights advertising screen in London’s Piccadilly Circus, as well as a global network of screens in cities including Berlin, Melbourne, Milan, New York, and Seoul, nightly for three minutes at 20:22 (8:22pm) throughout December 2022, with his new film, if when why what (2018–22). The project was presented by the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (CIRCA) in conjunction with the exhibition Douglas Gordon: Neon Ark at Gagosian, Davies Street, London.

The exhibition Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions premiered at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, in September 2022. It continues its tour with presentations at the Kunstmuseum Bern, through June 2023, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn, opening in April 2024. To mark this momentous survey, the show’s curator, Sabine Eckmann, met with Grosse to discuss the evolution of her practice.

To coincide with the release of the first English-language monograph on the career of Adriana Varejão—in which her diverse body of work is explored in depth, from her earliest paintings in the 1990s to her most recent multimedia installations—the artist has curated a selection of films as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph in the theater and online. The program features cinema exploring themes of eroticism, excess, and science-fiction fatalism.

In this video, Tatiana Trouvé provides an overview of her latest installation, presented at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The exhibition, whose title translates to The Great Atlas of Disorientation, includes a selection of drawings and sculptures that create fantastical landscapes where reality engages in infinite exchanges with its doubles.