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Spencer Sweeney

Spencer Sweeney is available for online reading from December 7 to January 5 as part of Artist Spotlight: Spencer Sweeney. At over five hundred pages, this large volume showcases the multifaceted artist’s role as an indelible and essential part of New York City’s cultural landscape for over two decades. In addition to reproductions of hundreds of Sweeney’s colorful paintings, the book features conversations between the artist and some of his friends with long-standing roots in the city’s music and art scenes, including Larry Clark, Natasha Lyonne, Glenn O’Brien, and Kembra Pfahler, as well as archival photographs that capture both legendary and obscure moments from throughout his career.

Spencer Sweeney (New York: Kiito-San, 2015)

Spencer Sweeney (New York: Kiito-San, 2015)

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Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney: Headz (New York: Kiito-San, 2019)

Online Reading

Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney
Headz

The first volume of Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney: Headz is available for online reading from December 7 through January 5 as part of Artist Spotlight: Spencer Sweeney. Housed in a screenprinted box, this eighteen-volume collection brings together the vibrant and varied drawings made during HEADZ NYC—a weekly gathering of food, music, and creativity hosted by Urs Fischer, Spencer Sweeney, and Brendan Dugan between October 2017 and July 2018 in New York’s Chinatown. Interspersed among the artworks are photos of the participants and the space of creative collaboration they activated.

Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney: Headz (New York: Kiito-San, 2019)

Photo: Pete Sieper

Artist Spotlight

Spencer Sweeney

December 7–13, 2022

Spencer Sweeney has been a vital presence in the art, nightlife, and music scenes of New York for more than twenty years. In addition to making paintings, drawings, and collages characterized by infectious exuberance and raw materiality, Sweeney produces multimedia environments that transform gallery spaces into open workshops and performance stages. Combining the extemporaneous vigor of Neo-Expressionism with the knowing repetition of signature motifs, the artist’s portraits, self-portraits, and reclining nudes reverberate with references to both popular culture and art history.

Photo: Pete Sieper

Spencer Sweeney in his studio, New York, 2020. Artwork © Spencer Sweeney. Photo: Pete Sieper

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Spencer Sweeney
Faces

September 24–30, 2020

Sometimes you find a convergent expression of joy and pain, almost in the same breath. This is what interests me.
—Spencer Sweeney

Gagosian is pleased to present paintings and works on paper by Spencer Sweeney online for galleryplatform.la. Curated from several existing bodies of work, the selection centers on the human face as a bearer of expression and a site for visual experimentation.

Sweeney’s paintings, drawings, and collages are alive with the same infectious energy as his multimedia environments, musical performances, and collaborative experiments. In the eight works on view, which were made between 2011 and 2020, the New York–based artist presents a vital and accessible take on the elemental formats of portrait and figure study, viewing them afresh through the mercurial lenses of popular culture and subjective experience. Inspired by the improvisational spirit of jazz, he produces intensely colored, boldly gestural images that reverberate with the amplified and distorted voices of art historical exemplars.

Spencer Sweeney in his studio, New York, 2020. Artwork © Spencer Sweeney. Photo: Pete Sieper

Self portrait of Francesca Woodman, she stands against a wall holding pieces of ripped wallpaper in front of her face and legs

Francesca Woodman

Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.

Cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2024, featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat Cover

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2024

The Spring 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available with a fresh cover design featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Lead Plate with Hole (1984).

Installation view, with three paintings by Simon Hantaï

Simon Hantaï: Azzurro

Join curator Anne Baldassari as she discusses the exhibition Simon Hantaï:Azzurro, Gagosian, Rome, and the significance of blue in the artist’s practice. The show forms part of a triptych with Gagosian’s two previous Hantaï exhibitions, LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR at Le Bourget in 2019–20, and Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc in New York, in 2022.

Sofia Coppola: Archive

Sofia Coppola: Archive

MACK recently published Sofia Coppola: Archive 1999–2023, the first publication to chronicle Coppola’s entire body of work in cinema. Comprised of the filmmaker’s personal photographs, developmental materials, drafted and annotated scripts, collages, and unseen behind-the-scenes photography from all of her films, the monograph offers readers an intimate look into the process behind these films.

Prosperity’s Long Song #1: At Lights-Out Hour

Prosperity’s Long Song #1: At Lights-Out Hour

We present the first installment of a four-part short story by Arinze Ifeakandu. Set at the Marian Boys’ Boarding School in Nigeria, “Prosperity’s Long Song” explores the country’s political upheavals through the lens of ancient mythologies and the mystical power of poetry.

Still from The World of Apu (1959), directed by Satyajit Ray, it features a close up shot of a person crying, only half of their face is visible, the rest is hidden behind fabric

Mount Fuji in Satyajit Ray’s Woodblock Art, Part II

In the first installment of this two-part feature, published in our Winter 2023 edition, novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri traced the global impacts of woodblock printing. Here, in the second installment, he focuses on the films of Satyajit Ray, demonstrating the enduring influence of the woodblock print on the formal composition of these works.

Two people stand on a snowy hill looking down

Adaptability

Adam Dalva looks at recent films born from short stories by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and asks, What makes a great adaptation? He considers how the beloved surrealist’s prose particularly lends itself to cinematic interpretation.

Chris Eitel in the Kagan Design Group workshop

Vladimir Kagan’s First Collection: An Interview with Chris Eitel

Chris Eitel, Vladimir Kagan’s protégé and the current director of design and production at Vladimir Kagan Design Group, invited the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to the brand’s studio in New Jersey, where the two discussed the forthcoming release of the First Collection. The series, now available through holly hunt, reintroduces the first chair and table that Kagan ever designed—part of Eitel’s efforts to honor the furniture avant-gardist’s legacy while carrying the company into the future.

Black and white portrait of Alexey Brodovitch

Game Changer: Alexey Brodovitch

Gerry Badger reflects on the persistent influence of the graphic designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitch, the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

Interior of Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland

Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner and Contemporary Art

Author and artist Ross Simonini reports on a recent trip to the world center of the anthroposophical movement, the Goetheanum in Switzerland, exploring the influence of the movement’s founder and building’s designer Rudolf Steiner on twentieth-century artists.

Black and white portrait of Frida Escobedo

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Frida Escobedo

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2024, we are honored to present the architect Frida Escobedo.

Black and white portrait of Katherine Dunham leaping in the air

Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955

Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the exhibition Border Crossings at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cocurated by Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, the show reexamines twentieth-century modern dance in the context of war, exile, and injustice. An accompanying catalogue, coedited by Bennahum and Rena Heinrich and published earlier this year, bridges the New York presentation with its West Coast counterpart at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.