Simon Hantaï: Azzurro, Gagosian, Rome, February 2–March 30, 2024
Artwork © Archives Simon Hantaï/ADAGP, Paris; video: Pushpin Films
March 6, 2024
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.
Simon Hantaï: Azzurro Blue
In conjunction with Azzurro, an exhibition of paintings by Simon Hantaï at Gagosian, Rome, we share the catalogue essay by curator Anne Baldassari. Here Baldassari focuses on the significance of blue in the artist’s practice, illuminating his affinity with Italy and the influence on his work of its classical painting tradition.
Simon Hantaï: Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc
Anne Baldassari reflects on the art historical influences and radical breaks reflected in the artist’s work with color.
Simon Hantaï
Anne Baldassari reflects on the time she spent working with Simon Hantaï on an ultimately unrealized stained-glass commission for the Cathédrale Saint-Cyr-et-Sainte-Julitte, Nevers, and explains how this endeavor served as the catalyst for an exhibition of Hantaï’s paintings that she curated at Gagosian, Le Bourget, in 2019.
Mary Weatherford: The Flaying of Marsyas
In conjunction with her exhibition The Flaying of Marsyas at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Mary Weatherford discusses the featured paintings, which are directly inspired by Titian’s late, eponymous masterpiece of circa 1570–76 and reflect her enduring fascination with the painting.
Behind the Art
A Foreigner Called Picasso
Join president of the Picasso Museum, Paris, Cécile Debray; curator, writer, biographer, and historian Annie Cohen-Solal; art historian Vérane Tasseau; and Gagosian director Serena Cattaneo Adorno as they discuss A Foreigner Called Picasso. Organized in association with the Musée national Picasso–Paris and the Palais de la Porte Dorée–Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris, the exhibition reframes our perception of Picasso and focuses on his status as a permanent foreigner in France.
Christo: Early Works
Christo: Early Works, curated by Elena Geuna, is the inaugural exhibition in the Gagosian Open series of off-site projects. In this video, Geuna explores the connection between Christo’s sculptural works and their setting in the historic Georgian house at 4 Princelet Street, London.
to light, and then return—: A Night of Poetry with Edmund de Waal, Elisa Gonzalez, Terrance Hayes, and Sally Mann
Gagosian presented an evening of poetry inside to light, and then return—, an exhibition of new works by Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann, inspired by each other’s practices, at Gagosian, New York. In this video—taking the artists’ shared love of poetry, fragments, and metamorphosis as a point of departure—poets Elisa Gonzalez and Terrance Hayes read a selection of their recent works that resonate with the themes of elegy and historical reckoning in the show. The evening was moderated by Jonathan Galassi, chairman and executive editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
In Conversation
Louise Bonnet and Stefanie Hessler
Gagosian hosted a conversation between Louise Bonnet and Stefanie Hessler, director of Swiss Institute, New York, inside 30 Ghosts, the artist’s exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian, New York. The pair explores the work’s recurring themes—the cycles of life, continuity and the future, and death—and discuss how the conceptual and pictorial structures Bonnet borrows from seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting converge to form a metaphor for hard labor, basic animal urges, and the things we often try, but fail, to hide.
In Conversation
Oscar Murillo and Ben Luke on Franz West
In conjunction with Franz West: Papier, the gallery’s presentation of paper-based works by Franz West at Frieze Masters 2023, artist Oscar Murillo and arts writer, critic, and broadcaster Ben Luke sit down to discuss Murillo’s collaboration in selecting the works on view, as well as his personal experiences meeting the late artist in London.
Urs Fischer: Wave
In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.
In Conversation
Georg Baselitz and Richard Calvocoressi
In conjunction with the exhibition The Painter in His Bed, at Gagosian, New York, Georg Baselitz and Richard Calvocoressi discuss the motif of the stag in the artist’s newest paintings.
Adelaide Damoah: Arachne, Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures
In this video, artist Adelaide Damoah performs Arachne: Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures inside the Rites of Passage exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London. The audiovisual journey, which features an original sound piece by Damoah and composer Liz Gre, interrogates the history of colonialism with the intention of unlocking new modes of understanding.