Art Fair
February 18–20, 2022, booth D12
Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills
frieze.com
Gagosian is pleased to announce its participation in Frieze Los Angeles 2022 with a presentation of Chris Burden’s Dreamer’s Folly (2010). This is the first time that the large-format sculpture has been exhibited in the United States.
The installation consists of three cast-iron gazebos that Burden conjoined to produce a fantastical structure. Painted white and accented with diaphanous lace that features a “tree of life” design, Dreamer’s Folly unites the traditions of interpreting and shaping nature in British decorative arts and landscape architecture. It is one of several sculptures that Burden titled with the word Folly, referring to the ornamental structures designed as focal points within gardens. The work explores the evocative power of its ornate forms, establishing an otherworldly space for reverie.
Dreamer’s Folly furthered a creative inquiry into the cultural meanings of the built environment that was critical to Burden’s artistic project. In its use of cast-iron elements to establish an immersive social space, the work is related to Urban Light (2008), his permanent installation of 202 antique streetlights that is a landmark work in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Tracking works by Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, and Eric Orr as outliers and outcroppings of the California Light and Space movement, Michael Auping argues that darkness—the absence of light and space—is a key element of the aesthetic.
As American identity once again comes into question during a politically charged election cycle, the Quarterly revisits the motif of the American flag in art. Here, John B. Ravenal contextualizes Robert Lazzarini’s new wall-based flag sculptures and elucidates the tensions they lay bare in the symbol of our nation.
Sydney Stutterheim has published Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics and Authorship in Art of the 1970s and 1980s (Duke University Press, 2024), a survey of performance art and related practices that involve, in various manners, the figure of the accomplice. To celebrate the publication, the Quarterly is publishing an excerpt that examines Chris Burden’s Deadman (1972).
Join Gagosian to celebrate the publication of Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden with a conversation between American Artist, Yayoi Shionoiri, and Sydney Stutterheim presented at the Kitchen, New York. Considering the book’s sustained examination of sixty-seven projects that remained incomplete at the time of Burden’s death in 2015, the trio discuss the various ways that an artist’s work and legacy live on beyond their lifetime.
Michael Auping tells the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about the preparations for a performance by Chris Burden at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Southern California in 1974—and the event’s abrupt cancellation—providing a glimpse into the mindset of a young, aggressive, and ambitious artist in the early stages of his career.
The Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, with two different covers—featuring Takashi Murakami’s 108 Bonnō MURAKAMI.FLOWERS (2022) and Andreas Gursky’s V & R II (2022).
A new publication exploring the work that Chris Burden conceived but left unrealized delves into his archive to present sixty-seven visionary projects that reveal the aspirations of this formidable artist. The book’s editors, Sydney Stutterheim and Andie Trainer, discuss its development with Yayoi Shionoiri, executive director of the Chris Burden Estate.
From January 23 to February 21, 2019, Gagosian Quarterly presented a special online screening of Chris Burden’s 1980 video Big Wrench.
Sydney Stutterheim looks at the brief but feverish obsession behind this 1980 video by Chris Burden.
Sydney Stutterheim discusses Chris Burden’s Deluxe Photo Book 1971–73 on the occasion of its inclusion in About Photography at Gagosian San Francisco.
Ten years ago LACMA premiered Chris Burden’s Urban Light, which has since become an iconic landmark for the city of Los Angeles. To celebrate the anniversary, we look back to 2008 with a conversation between Chris Burden and Michael Govan, director of LACMA.
The story behind Chris Burden’s Buddha’s Fingers (2014–15) and its connection to all of his streetlamp installations. Text by Sydney Stutterheim.
