![Augurs of Spring](https://gagosian.com/media/images/quarterly/essay-augurs-of-spring/aVe8TQDjLbOk_300x300.jpg)
Augurs of Spring
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Art Fair
Long considered the season of rebirth, springtime marks the transition from the austere months of winter into the lush abundance of summer, serving as a reminder of nascent growth, life, and possibility.
Drawing inspiration from the 1865 poem “Printemps oublié” (“Forgotten Spring”) by Sully Prudhomme, Gagosian’s presentation for the first online edition of FIAC alludes to the duality inherent to spring: carrying forth the weight of the immediate past while presenting glimpses of a vibrant and prolific future to come. In 2021, recognizing the enduring magnificence of the natural world—in the face of both the previously unimaginable circumstances that defined the past year and the precarity of environmental futures—gains considerable urgency today.
Printemps oublié celebrates the poignancy of these contradictions by presenting artworks that reflect on, investigate, or revel in the joys of spring as the new season both literally and metaphorically approaches.
All the artworks will appear on the Gagosian website and a rotating selection will appear in the inaugural FIAC Online Viewing Rooms, from March 4 to 7. To receive a pdf with detailed information on the works, please contact the gallery at inquire@gagosian.com.
Jeff Koons, Bluebird Planter, 2010–16 © Jeff Koons
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Jeff Wall speaks to Gary Dufour about his new photographs, made on the beachfront of English Bay in Vancouver, Canada, that record the endlessly varied and shifting patterns created in seaweed by the ebb and flow of the tide.
The inaugural presentation of Frieze Sculpture New York at Rockefeller Center opened on April 25, 2019. Before the opening, Brett Littman, the director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and the curator of this exhibition, told Wyatt Allgeier about his vision for the project and detailed the artworks included.
In this video, Marc Newson provides an overview of his latest exhibition. He details the various technical processes behind his new designs, including works in cloisonné, surfboards, swords, and large-scale glass chairs.
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.
Join curator Anne Baldassari as she discusses the exhibition Simon Hantaï: Azzurro, Gagosian, Rome, and the significance of blue in the artist’s practice. The show forms part of a triptych with Gagosian’s two previous Hantaï exhibitions, LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR at Le Bourget in 2019–20, and Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc in New York, in 2022.
The Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, has staged a comprehensive Jeff Wall exhibition including more than fifty works spanning five decades. Here, Barry Schwabsky reflects on the enduring power of and mystery in Wall’s photography.
In conjunction with Azzurro, an exhibition of paintings by Simon Hantaï at Gagosian, Rome, we share the catalogue essay by curator Anne Baldassari. Here Baldassari focuses on the significance of blue in the artist’s practice, illuminating his affinity with Italy and the influence on his work of its classical painting tradition.
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.
Lee Miller and Tanja Ramm’s friendship took them from New York to Paris and back, in front of and behind many cameras, and into the Surrealist avant-garde. Here, Gagosian director Richard Calvocoressi speaks with Ramm’s daughter, art historian Margit Rowell, about discovering her mother’s early life, her memories of Miller, and the collaborative work of photographers and models.
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.