The Bold Stroke: Spencer Sweeney & Lizzi Bougatsos
Old friends chat about their love of music, nightclub paintings, life lessons from aikido, and Spencer Sweeney’s upcoming exhibition The Painted Bride, at Gagosian, New York.
Art Fair
January 12–15, 2023, booth BF05
Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore
artsg.com
Gagosian is pleased to announce the gallery’s participation in the inaugural edition of ART SG, with a selection of works by international contemporary artists including Banksy, Georg Baselitz, Ashley Bickerton, Edmund de Waal, Helen Frankenthaler, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Thomas Houseago, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Jia Aili, Harmony Korine, Takashi Murakami, Nam June Paik, Giuseppe Penone, Ed Ruscha, Spencer Sweeney, Sarah Sze, Tatiana Trouvé, Anna Weyant, Jonas Wood, and Zeng Fanzhi.
The presentation features two works by Ashley Bickerton, who passed away in November 2022. Seascape: Floating Ocean Chunk No. 1 (2017) and 6°50'03.0"S 121°06'55.0"E (2022) belong to Bickerton’s Ocean Chunk series of sculptures. These translucent resin blocks, embedded with fabricated formations of sand, rock, and coral, evoke the artist’s love of the sea. Bickerton first conceived the series in New York during the winter of 1992, just before his permanent relocation to the Indonesian island of Bali. The sculptures reflect not only his tropical roots, but also his surfing experience. Acknowledging the entanglement of nature and technology, they signal humanity’s exploitation of natural resources.
In his characteristically mordant gilt-framed painting Guantanamo (2006), from the series Crude Oils, Banksy depicts a figure wearing the orange jumpsuit of a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay detention camp, his wrists bound together and a hood covering his head as he crouches on a sunlit beach. Tetsuya Ishida’s surreal painting Untitled (1995) depicts a man curled up in the fetal position before a television set, a border of numbers and other information lending the composition the appearance of an ultrasound display. Zeng Fanzhi’s tangled landscape Untitled (2017) and abstracted skull image Untitled (2020) extend the artist’s visual exploration of Taoist insights into the transience of human life and endeavor in the context of a boundless natural world.
Gagosian’s booth at ART SG 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Ashley Bickerton; © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2022; © Banksy; © Zeng Fanzhi; © 2020 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Old friends chat about their love of music, nightclub paintings, life lessons from aikido, and Spencer Sweeney’s upcoming exhibition The Painted Bride, at Gagosian, New York.
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, 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.
In conjunction with My Anxious Self, the most comprehensive survey of paintings by the late Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) to have been staged outside of Japan and the first-ever exhibition of his work in New York, Gagosian hosted a panel discussion. Here, Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities at Harvard University, delve into the societal context in which Ishida developed his work, in a conversation moderated by exhibition curator Cecilia Alemani.
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.
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.
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.
This documentary film includes footage of Ashley Bickerton as he gives a tour of his Bali studio during his final year, as well as interviews with artists Matthew Barney, Mark Dion, Damien Hirst, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Jon Kessler, and writer Paul Theroux.
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.
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.
Inspired by Anna Weyant’s still lifes, John Elderfield explores the genre and its relationship with trompe l’oeil techniques, tracking its formal development, as well as the evolving critical receptions it has elicited.
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.