Frieze Los Angeles 2024 | Fairs | Fairs & Collecting

Gagosian is pleased to announce its participation in Frieze Los Angeles 2024 with Social Abstraction, a diverse selection of paintings and sculptures rooted in the exploration of historic qualities of abstraction and contemporary social realities. The first in a sequence of three presentations organized by Antwaun Sargent, Social Abstraction at Frieze Los Angeles will be followed by exhibitions in Beverly Hills this summer and in Hong Kong this fall.

The intergenerational group of Black artists in Social Abstraction—Derrick Adams, Theaster Gates, Cy Gavin, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe—operates beyond purely formal concerns to create artworks that move between and beyond figuration and abstraction. They push shape to become landscape, color to reveal people, and texture to map the totality of experience.

Download the full press release (PDF)

Gagosian’s booth at Frieze Los Angeles 2024. Artwork, front to back: © Lauren Halsey, © Cy Gavin, © Theaster Gates. Photo: Ed Mumford

From the Quarterly

Derrick Adams: View Master

On April 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened the first midcareer survey of Derrick Adams’s multidisciplinary practice. Covering over twenty years of work, the exhibition, titled View Master, brings together the artist’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, and video, as well as a vibrant new commission created for the museum’s façade. Ahead of the opening, Adams met with Tessa Bachi Haas, cocurator of the survey, to discuss his formative experiences with television, the impact of his work in arts education on his practice, and the importance of taking a more complex, more joyful, and more expansive approach to Black American life and culture.

Theaster Gates: Dave, All My Relations

A conversation between Theaster Gates and Jessica Bell Brown, with an introduction by Sydney Stutterheim.

AMA Venezia

Celebrating the collector Laurent Asscher’s new art space in Venice, William Middleton underscores the richness of Asscher’s relationships with artists.

In Conversation
Derrick Adams and Ekow Eshun

Join Gagosian for a conversation between Derrick Adams and Ekow Eshun, author, curator, and chair of the commissioning group for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. The pair discuss Adams’s latest paintings depicting visions of Black Americana—featured in the exhibition Situation Comedy at Gagosian, Davies Street, London—within the context of British contemporary culture.

In Conversation
Rick Lowe, Dieter Roelstraete, Abigail Winograd

Gagosian and Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, hosted a conversation between Rick Lowe; Dieter Roelstraete, curator of Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago; and Abigail Winograd, commissioner and curator of the United States Pavilion at the 60th Biennale di Venezia. The trio discuss the exhibition The Arch within the Arc in the context of Lowe’s overall practice, as well as Gagosian’s recently published monograph on the artist.

Derrick Adams: Super Nudes

Fondation Louis Vuitton commissioned Derrick Adams, Tomokazu Matsuyama, and Mickalene Thomas to respond to the work of Tom Wesselmann for their exhibition Pop Forever Tom Wesselmann &… (October 17, 2024–February 24, 2025). Here, Derrick Adams speaks with the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier about the origin of his Super Nudes series and its investigations of humor, power, and vulnerability.

Transferring the Energy: Theaster Gates

Writer and curator Olivia Anani met Theaster Gates in his exhibition Black Mystic at Gagosian, Le Bourget, to discuss the importance of translation and relocation, the ever-expanding horizons of his practice, and his use of tar.

Rick Lowe & Kevin Beasley

Artists Rick Lowe and Kevin Beasley discuss their engagement with material and place, as well as the social potentials of abstraction.

Notes to Selves, Trains of Thought

Dieter Roelstraete, curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago and coeditor of a recent monograph on Rick Lowe, writes on Lowe’s journey from painting to community-based projects and back again in this essay from the publication. At the Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, during the 60th Biennale di Venezia, Lowe will exhibit new paintings that develop his recent motifs to further explore the arch in architecture.

Lauren Halsey: Full and Complete Freedom

Essence Harden, curator at Los Angeles’s California African American Museum and cocurator of next year’s Made in LA exhibition at the Hammer Museum, visited Lauren Halsey in her LA studio as the artist prepared for an exhibition in Paris and the premiere of her installation at the 60th Biennale di Venezia this summer.