Installation Views

Works Exhibited

About

I went in search of myself.
—Heraclitus, Fragment

We might be at the end of our Rome.
—Ed Ruscha

Gagosian is pleased to present a group exhibition that brings together richly varied works by international, regional, and local artists that reflect on the poetic power of ruins and fragments—in the city of Athens, a thriving contemporary metropolis charged with the traces of ancient histories. For some of these artists, this will be the first time that their work will be seen in Greece. Ruins and Fragments is organized by Louise Neri and Christina Papadopoulou.

Architecture, sculpture, and material culture in states either ruined or incomplete stimulate the mind to imagine what might have been, or could be, in the elusive human quest for certainty and completeness. Ed Ruscha is drawn to desolate and melancholy places, to voids both physical and spiritual. Throughout his career, he has found countless new ways to depict these landscapes with “no past—just what passes for a future.” In the Metro Mattress paintings (2015), working in acrylic on paper, he depicts derelict bedding and wrecked box springs, discarded on the streets of Los Angeles, isolated in empty white space. These unlikely characters slump and sag with age, their rips and stains attesting to the bare life they once supported. For Rena Papaspyrou, the city of Athens is a perpetual site of experimentation as well as the material and conceptual source of her art. In works such as Image through Matter and Geography (Images through Matter) (both 1981), she removed the cutaneous layer of wall segments and modified them with pencil or marker, reconstituting them as autonomous artworks that possess the visual complexity of maps or abstract paintings, wherein the viewer can discover images ingrained in surfaces by the actions of time.

#RuinsandFragments
Katharina Grosse: Messeplatz Project 2025

Katharina Grosse: Messeplatz Project 2025

For Art Basel 2025, the fair has commissioned Katharina Grosse to create CHOIR, a large-scale, site-responsive painting for the Messeplatz Project. The curator for the project, Natalia Grabowska, met with Grosse in her studio in Berlin ahead of the work’s creation to talk through the process; Grosse’s approach to the specifics of the Messeplatz’s architecture; and the importance of unscripted encounters.

Adriana Varejão: Pratos

Adriana Varejão: Pratos

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.

Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come From the Tropics

Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come From the Tropics

In conjunction with the exhibition Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come From the Tropics at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, Laura Dias Leite produced a video directed by Luisa Marques in which the artist discusses the genesis of the show. The exhibition debuts the latest works in Varejão’s Plate series (2011–), which, shown alongside historic ceramic plates from the museum’s collection, pose questions about aesthetic hierarchies.

The World as Playground

The World as Playground

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.

Artist to Artist: Sarah Sze and Rirkrit Tiravanija

Artist to Artist: Sarah Sze and Rirkrit Tiravanija

In 2023, Sarah Sze’s immersive video installation Pictures at an Exhibition made its debut at the Thailand Biennale, titled The Open World and codirected by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong in Chiang Rai. On the occasion of the work’s inclusion in Sze’s 2024 exhibition at Gagosian, Paris, she met with Tiravanija to discuss thriving in chaos, making room for experiences in time, and her materials.

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.

Douglas Gordon: To Sing

Douglas Gordon: To Sing

On the occasion of Douglas Gordon: All I need is a little bit of everything, an exhibition in London, curator Adam Szymczyk recounts his experiences with Gordon’s work across nearly three decades, noting the continuities and evolutions.

Sarah Sze: Timelapse

Sarah Sze: Timelapse

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.

Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now

Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now

To celebrate the publication of Phaidon’s new, expansive survey, we share an excerpt from Raphael Fonseca’s introduction and a few of the more than three hundred artists featured.

Douglas Gordon: if when why what

Douglas Gordon: if when why what

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.

Sarah Sze: Timelapse

Sarah Sze: Timelapse

In this video, Sarah Sze elaborates on the creation of her solo exhibition Timelapse, on view through September 10, 2023. The show features a series of site-specific installations throughout the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, that explore her ongoing reflection on how our experience of time and place is continuously reshaped in relationship to the constant stream of objects, images, and information in today’s digitally and materially saturated world. In Sze’s reimagination of the Guggenheim’s iconic architecture, designed in the 1940s by Frank Lloyd Wright, the building becomes a public timekeeper reminding us that timelines are built through shared experience and memory.

All I Wanted To Do Was Paint: A Conversation between Katharina Grosse and Sabine Eckmann

All I Wanted To Do Was Paint: A Conversation between Katharina Grosse and Sabine Eckmann

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.

Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2023

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2023

The Summer 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on its cover.

Adriana Varejão Selects

Adriana Varejão Selects

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.

Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2022

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2022

The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.

Tatiana Trouvé: Le grand atlas de la désorientation

Tatiana Trouvé: Le grand atlas de la désorientation

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.

Giuseppe Penone À La Tourette

Giuseppe Penone À La Tourette

Le Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, in Éveux, France, is both an active Dominican priory and the last building designed by Le Corbusier. As a result, the priory, completed in 1961, is a center both religious and architectural, a site of spiritual significance and a magnetic draw for artists, writers, architects, and others. This fall, at the invitation of Frère Marc Chauveau, Giuseppe Penone will be exhibiting a selection of existing sculptures at La Tourette alongside new work directly inspired by the context and materials of the building. Here, Penone and Frère Chauveau discuss the power and peculiarities of the space, as well as the artwork that will be exhibited there.

Flags

Flags

Gillian Pistell writes on the loaded symbol of the American flag in the work of postwar and contemporary artists.

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Theaster Gates

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Theaster Gates

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents are invited to make a selection from the larger questionnaire and to reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For this installment, we are honored to present the artist Theaster Gates, whose Serpentine Pavilion 2022 Black Chapel opened in London on June 10.

Artist to Artist: Pat Steir and Sarah Sze

Artist to Artist: Pat Steir and Sarah Sze

On the occasion of her exhibition of recent paintings, presented at Gagosian in Rome, Pat Steir met with fellow artist Sarah Sze for a wide-ranging discussion—from shared inspirations and influences to the role of chance, contingency, place, and time in painting.