We celebrate Mary Weatherford: Train Yards—a new exhibition at Gagosian, London—with the first episode of Gagosian Premieres, featuring an exclusive performance by Thurston Moore inside the gallery and a conversation between Mary Weatherford and Hunter Drohojowska-Philp in the artist’s Los Angeles studio.
Weatherford’s Train Yard paintings are abstracted interpretations of the titular site after dark, in which deep purple and black grounds—often punctuated by white neon light tubes—evoke the history and aura of their subject. The artist describes these works as visual embodiments of environmental noise: “the clanging of bells and whistles and the sound of trains.”
Best known as one of the founders of the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, Moore will translate the American folk and blues music that inspired the Train Yard paintings in a special performance including a new composition. Critic and journalist Drohojowska-Philp will speak with Weatherford about the influence and wide-ranging effects the transcontinental railroad had on American histories, her process and approach to the series, and the challenges of trying to paint an experience