Gagosian is pleased to participate, for the first time, in the Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt, with a presentation of contemporary paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper.
The tension between the real-world grit portrayed in the featured works and the stylish period decor of the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel—whose interior was designed to evoke dreams of the city’s golden era—mirrors the chasm between everyday reality and romantic imagination. In their pursuit of truthfulness, the featured artists provide an illuminating contrast between real life and Los Angeles’s more elusive fantasies of glamour and fame.
In the hyperrealistic sculpture High School Student (1990–92), Duane Hanson reproduces his subject with uncanny verisimilitude, registering every detail of a scruffy teenage boy—an incongruous guest in a luxury hotel. With similar objective precision, Ed Ruscha’s work on paper Metro Mattress #6 (2015) depicts a worn-down mattress in a state of neglect, as if discarded on the street. Ruscha isolates the motif in the center of the page, rendering it both prosaic and strange. In Study for Bedroom Painting #74 (1983), Tom Wesselmann combines a schematic female nude with colorful interior elements in a manner both abstract and Pop. And in the photograph Black Square XXIII, Phoenix canariensis, Woolsey Fire (2019), Taryn Simon pictures a charred palm tree against a night sky. Brought to California from the Canary Islands, the tree fueled and survived a devastating wildfire.
To receive a pdf with detailed information on the works in Gagosian’s booth, please contact the gallery at inquire@gagosian.com.
To attend the fair, purchase tickets at felixfair.com.
Duane Hanson, High School Student, 1990–92, 1 of 2 unique versions © 2021 Estate of Duane Hanson/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Last fall, Taryn Simon debuted an interactive sculpture entitled Kleroterion (2024). Based on a device from the beginnings of democracy in Athens, the work was installed at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York. As part of that presentation, Simon participated in a panel discussion with Nora Lawrence, Tomás González Olavarría, and Philip Lindsay about democracy, sortition, and art’s place in politics.
Fondation Louis Vuitton is staging Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…, which explores the artist’s legacy through a comprehensive survey of his artworks presented alongside those by thirty-five artists of different generations and nationalities, from the 1920s to the present day. Also, the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, Gagosian, and Almine Rech are releasing a forthcoming monograph dedicated to the artist’s formative series, The Great American Nude. Here, the book’s editor and lead author Susan Davidson meets with Jeffrey Sturges, director of exhibitions for the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, and Gagosian director Jason Ysenburg to discuss the importance of this series.
On the occasion of an exhibition at Fondation Beyeler, novelist Rachel Cusk considers the ethical and aesthetic arrangements that Duane Hanson’s sculpture initiates within the viewer.
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.
Susan Davidson, editor of the forthcoming monograph on the Great American Nudes, a series of works by Tom Wesselmann, explores the artist’s early experiments with collage, tracing their development from humble beginnings to the iconic series of paintings.
On the occasion of the exhibition Tom Wesselmann: Intimate Spaces at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, Susan Davidson sat down with Jeffrey Sturges to discuss the artist’s key works in his Great American Nudes (1961–73) and subsequent series.
To celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, staged an exhibition entitled Jubiläumsausstellung—Special Guest Duane Hanson. The presentation featured several sculptures by Duane Hanson alongside more than one hundred works from the foundation’s collection. Alice Godwin considers the fertile dialogues produced by these juxtapositions.
The Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.
Gillian Pistell writes on the loaded symbol of the American flag in the work of postwar and contemporary artists.
This spring, as part of the Lambert Family Lecture Series at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Taryn Simon joined Teju Cole for an online conversation about her artistic practice and creative process.
In Taryn Simon’s performance work An Occupation of Loss (2016), professional mourners enact rituals of grief, simultaneously broadcasting their lamentations from within a sculptural installation. This video by filmmaker Boris B. Bertram documents the April 2018 performance of this work with Artangel in Islington, London.
Joshua Chuang, the Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library, discusses the institution’s singular Picture Collection, the artist Taryn Simon’s rigorous engagement with it, and four instances of its little-known role in the history of art making.
