February 16, 2018
The Spring 2018 Gagosian Quarterly is now available and begins the year with a stunning new work by Ed Ruscha on its cover.
Detail from Ed Ruscha’s Our Flag (2017) on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2018
Detail from Ed Ruscha’s Our Flag (2017) on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2018
In this issue, Drew Gilpin Faust meditates on Sally Mann’s landscape photographs of Civil War battlefields; Timothy Baum writes about Man Ray’s emigration from Paris to Los Angeles during World War II; Takashi Murakami, collaborating with scholar Nobuo Tsuji, reinterprets the work of Edo period painter Soga Shōhaku; and Glenn Brown tells novelist Hari Kunzru about the ways in which the past breathes life into his newest works. Author Francine Prose, in the first installment of her four-part series, “The Lives of the Artists,” weaves a tale of a Venetian painter whose artistic talent is as much a curse as a gift. We also take a close look at Giuseppe Penone’s recent installation in the hills of Gstaad, Switzerland; the drawings of Richard Serra; and much more!
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Cover © Ed Ruscha
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.
Sally Mann joined novelist Amor Towles in a conversation about her widely celebrated new book, Art Work: On the Creative Life (2025), at an event hosted by the New School and the Strand in New York. Published by Abrams, Art Work is about the challenges and pleasures of the creative process. Its mix of illuminating stories, practical advice, and life lessons, illustrated throughout with photographs, letters, and journal entries, offers insights into Mann’s own experience of making art. Here, Mann and Towles speak about the writing process, historical ghosts, and fortunate mistakes.
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.
Join Glenn Brown in his London studio as he discusses his presentation for the Studio section of Frieze Masters 2025, which explores the idea of the artist’s studio as a time machine: a space in which historical memory fuels creativity, manifesting in artworks that look to the future. Brown speaks about the featured works, which range from new paintings, drawings, and a sculpture to historic works on paper from the Brown Collection.
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.
Karen Wong charts the journey of Alexander Calder’s Quatre lances (1964) from its intended site at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, to the Centennial Hall in Monaco, and now to its permanent home in a new single-artwork museum designed by Renzo Piano at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Wong examines the sculpture’s interaction with architecture and environment as part of a larger story of the artist’s relationship with architects.
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.
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.
Curator Michael Auping reflects on his time spent with John Chamberlain in Sarasota, Florida.
This year marks the centennial of André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto.” In its honor, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, in close collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, staged the exhibition IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism, which will be traveling to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, before closing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. To mark the occasion and the exhibition, artists Glenn Brown and Alexandria Smith met to discuss the influence of the movement on their own practices.
On the occasion of Douglas Gordon: All I need is a little bit of everything, an exhibition in London, curator Adam Szymczyk recounts his experiences with Gordon’s work across nearly three decades, noting the continuities and evolutions.