Installation View All photographs are via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted
Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia street, London is the exhibition titled “Crash, Homage to J.G. Ballard” , a group show dedicated, as the name suggests, to the oeuvre of J.D. Ballard, a prominent British novelist and short-story writer, a representative of the New Wave movement in science fiction. The exhibition was put together to pay tribute to the enormous cultural influence of J.D. Ballard’s fiction on many visual artists. The impressive selection of works by such prominent artists as Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, AndyWarhol and Helmut Newton illustrates profound engagement of the writer with the works of visual artists of his generation and their mutual influence.
More images and related links after the jump….
Untitled by Jean-Michael Basquiat
Fountain of Crystal by Ed Ruscha
Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard) by Tacita Dean
The first novel by J.D. Ballard was published in 1956, the same year when a renowned exhibition “This is Tomorrow” took place at Whitechapel Gallery in London. The exhibition that featured works by such prominent representatives of the Surrealist movement as Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux left a lasting impression on the writer. It is in these works Ballard saw what he called ” the seeds of the fiction for the present day”.
Piazza d’Italia by Giorgio de Chirico 1913, one of the earliest Surrealist works
Canape Blue by Paul Devaux
J.D.Ballard’s apocalyptic prose, with its depictions of bleak man-made landscapes, as well as devastating impact of the developing technology on the destiny of the humans, found response among numerous writers, filmmakers and visual artists. Collins English Dictionary contains the adjective “Ballardian” that arose from literary distinctiveness of his dystopian depictions of the present and the future. His best-known books are Crash (1973), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, and the autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984), made into a film by Steven Spielberg.
Destruction III by Richard Artschwager
Still-life, Broken Statue and Shadow by Francis Bacon
The Self-Portrait of You + Me by Douglas Gourdon
In 2009, J.D. Ballard died of prostate cancer. The exhibition that celebrates his spectacular career includes, among others, works by Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, Glenn Brown, Chris Burden, Jake & Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Salvador Dalí, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter,Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol. The show is on view until April,1.
Relevant Links:
Exhibition’s web-page [Gagosian Gallery]
Art and J.D.Ballard collide at Crash [Guardian]
