News

Friday, July 16, 2021, 3pm EDT

Join Titus Kaphar and fellow artist Diana Pumpelly Bates for a conversation about Black creativity, artistic inspiration, and the importance of mentorship. This discussion, held in conjunction with the traveling exhibition The Black Index, will be moderated by exhibition curator Bridget R. Cooks. To attend the online event, register at eventbrite.com.

June 14–August 31, 2021
Taikoo Park, Hong Kong
www.taikooplace.com

Michael Craig-Martin’s powder-coated steel sculptures depicting everyday objects are on display at Taikoo Park, Hong Kong. The forms have an instant sensory, intellectual, and emotional impact, evoking the tangible experiences of daily life while speaking to the symbolic potency the represented objects hold. This installation, organized by Swire Properties, celebrates the company’s commitment to art and culture.

Thursday, July 15, 2021, 6–8pm
Gagosian, Britannia Street, London

The Britannia Street gallery will be open after hours to visit Damien Hirst: Relics and Fly Paintings, the second phase of the artist’s yearlong takeover of the space. For this new iteration, the artist has clad the interior of the gallery in black butterfly-patterned wallpaper that reproduces the kaleidoscopic surface of his painting Valley of Death (2010). With its uniquely immersive atmosphere, the exhibition brings together a number of Hirst’s bodies of work, prompting reflections on themes of darkness and death, the past and the future.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021, 12pm EDT

Join art critics Arthur Lubow and Mark Stevens for a conversation on the occasion of the exhibition Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. The pair will discuss painters Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), their respective techniques, and how they pushed the capabilities of oil paint to create surfaces with the tactile, pliable, squirming quality of flesh. To attend the online event, register at tickets.barnesfoundation.org.

Takashi Murakami has partnered with Absolut Art in creating a limited-edition print—the second of three exclusive collaborations—to benefit the Kitchen, New York, on the occasion of the nonprofit space’s fiftieth anniversary. All proceeds will go toward a planned renovation, ensuring that it will remain a platform for artistic experimentation in its historic and beloved building. The signed print, Thank You for the Wonderful Destiny (2020), features Murakami’s signature smiling flowers and will be available exclusively through Absolut Art starting July 15. To register for the lottery to receive a link to purchase the work, visit www.absolutart.com.

Wednesday, June 30, 2021, 8am EDT (1pm BDT)

Edmund de Waal will speak with Gagosian director Richard Calvocoressi in a conversation entitled “The Thinking Hand,” on the occasion of the exhibition The Human Touch at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, England. Sitting in front of a large painting of a hand by Georg Baselitz, the final work in the exhibition, they will explore the creativity of the artist’s hands and the marks and traces they leave, beginning by discussing Calvocoressi’s monograph on Baselitz, published by Thames and Hudson in May 2021. The pair will revisit their conversation entitled “The Possibility of Touch,” published in the catalogue for the 2015 exhibition Henry Moore: Wunderkammer—Origin of Forms at Gagosian, London, curated by Calvocoressi, formerly director of the Henry Moore Foundation. De Waal has also been exploring the role of touch and the iconography of the hand in Henry Moore’s art in This Living Hand, an exhibition he curated at the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens, Perry Green, England, on view through October 31, 2021. To attend the online event, register at tickets.museums.cam.ac.uk.

On July 14, 2021, Damien Hirst released The Currency—a collection of ten thousand NFTs that correspond to ten thousand unique physical artworks—with HENI on Palm, a new, more environmentally friendly NFT ecosystem. Collectors are invited to apply to buy an NFT through July 21, 2021. Successful applicants will all initially receive NFTs. Ultimately, each collector has one year to decide between keeping the NFT or trading it for the physical artwork; whichever is not selected will be destroyed. The Currency is an experiment in belief in which every participant is confronted with their perception of value, testing the boundaries of the digital and physical worlds and our role in both.

In this time-lapse video, Damien Hirst’s Hylonome (2011) is installed at Gagosian, Rome, for the exhibition Forgiving and Forgetting, on view from July 6 through October 23, 2021. Rendered in Carrara marble, the female centaur, whose statuesque form conjures both Baroque corporeality and the stately symmetry of French Neoclassical sculpture, sparks an unexpected interplay between ancient and modern. The work is from the artist’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, a project that presented sculptural relics from a fictional shipwreck off the coast of East Africa, playing fast and loose with linear time, cultural origin, and perceptions of relative status and value.

Gagosian is pleased to announce the representation of Jim Shaw. Since the 1970s, Shaw has mined the dreams and conflicted realities of American culture, finding inspiration in comic books, pulp novels, rock albums, protest posters, and thrift store paintings. Blending the personal, the commonplace, and the uncanny, Shaw’s works frequently place in dialogue images of friends and family with world events, pop culture, and alternate realities, often unfolding in long-term narrative cycles.

Download the full press release (pdf)

Michael Craig-Martin is participating in the first iteration of Artists Support: London, launching June 17, 2021. Craig-Martin will donate 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of his artwork Untitled (steering wheel fragment) (2016) to Centrepoint, the United Kingdom’s leading charity dedicated to fighting youth homelessness. The work will be available through November 20, 2021. Artists Support is a nonprofit initiative powered by artists, who donate a work for sale whose proceeds directly support a local charity of their choice. For more information, visit artists-support.com.

Edmund de Waal was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in Queen Elizabeth II’s 2021 birthday honors list for his service to the arts as a potter and a writer. The title CBE is bestowed to individuals who have made distinct and innovative contributions to the United Kingdom.

Tatiana Trouvé has partnered with Parley for the Oceans, a nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to promoting ocean sustainability, in creating a limited-edition print based on her original drawing August (2019), with 100 percent of the proceeds funding Parley’s plastic interception and cleanups, education programs, and eco-innovation projects that help protect the oceans. The work, which began with an image of the Amazon rain forest burning in August 2019, alludes to political violence against Indigenous populations and the biodiversity of the rain forest. To inquire about purchasing a print, contact sara@parley.tv.