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
Adam D. Weinberg has been working with Giuseppe Penone on an exhibition of the artist’s new sculptures, The Reflection of Bronze, that opens at Gagosian, New York, on April 22. The works explore the character and possibilities of bronze. Here, Weinberg considers Penone’s enduring engagement with the alloy and addresses the conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition’s three-room structure.
Following a recent visit to Jonas Wood’s Los Angeles studio, Justin Beal thinks through the artist’s paintings of tennis courts—the subject of an exhibition at Gagosian, Beverly Hills—examining their relation to the game, color theory, and the rewards of practice.
The Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection in Venice opened Tatiana Trouvé: The Strange Life of Things this past April. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition’s venue served as a key starting point for the creation of new sculptures, large-scale drawings, and site-specific installations, all presented in dialogue with bodies of work from the past decade. A catalogue was published alongside the exhibition, and here we share Neville Wakefield’s essay on Trouvé’s radical forms of cartography.
Anna Weyant’s first solo institutional exhibition, at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, was curated by Guillermo Solana in close collaboration with the artist, and places more than twenty paintings by Weyant in dialogue with a selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection. Sydney Stutterheim considers the artist’s contemporary exploration of suspense, identity, concealment, and temporality.
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.
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.
Sam Wasson brings his deep knowledge of cinema, Hollywood, and film noir to Alex Israel’s new paintings of Los Angeles.
In conjunction with the exhibition Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami at Gagosian, London, Takashi Murakami and Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator and artistic director of Serpentine, London, sit down to discuss the artist’s exploration and contemporizing of ancient Japanese artworks and movements. The two delve into Murakami’s investigation of Iwasa Matabei’s seventeenth-century masterwork Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu (Scenes in and around Kyoto) and the Kyoto-based style of Rinpa painting, among other examples.
Ed Schad, curator and publications manager at the Broad, Los Angeles, examines Takashi Murakami’s prolonged engagement with the practice and concept of the copy. An exhibition of new paintings by the artist, Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami, opened at Gagosian, London, on December 10, 2024; Schad reflects on Murakami’s recent works in the wake of his visit to the artist’s 2024 exhibition at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art.
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.
Eli Diner visits Jonas Wood in his Los Angeles studio as the artist prepares for an exhibition of new paintings in London.
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.
