Poetry, Dan Colen (2010) via Gagosian

Dan Colen gets past his own (painterly graffiti) writer’s block of a sculptural brick wall (akin to his old urban-artifact based work) and progresses with new strides into the hallowed halls of Gagosian, replete with Gagosian scale, funding, and grandiosity. The gum and grit gestalt gestures are still there but the subject matter has taken a new turn. Namely, Abstraction, and abstraction as abstraction, or “Poetry,” if you will.

The abstract painting at the end of the gallery’s western wall, speaks of a new turn from the artist’s earlier more prosaic if suburbanistic urban-fetish ‘artifactualizations.’ The fashionable bad-boy has entered the brand-building (edifice on 24th street) and even brings with him a painterly painting from the wrong side of the tracks, river, and art history.

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Echolalia (2010) by Franz West, via Gagosian Gallery

I see my works as quite compatible with a l’art pour l’art philosophy. One may think that I try to take the art object out into the world since my works sometimes appear to have a practical function, but really it’s the other way around: things in the world can, under certain special circumstances, enter the realm of art.

-Franz West

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery in Rome is Franz West’s “Roman Room,” an exhibition of new sculpture by the Austrian-born artist. In this body of work, West transforms basic shapes into irregular, large-scale structures. He incorporates visual elements derived from performance art, as well as classical art and sculpture.

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Untitled (2010) by Rachel Whiteread, via Gagosian Gallery

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery on Davies Street in London is an exhibition of drawings and new sculpture by Rachel Whiteread. The sculptural work is the latest in a series created for outdoor spaces, produced in soft materials such as plaster, rubber and resin. Five cubic forms of varying size, texture, and color are positioned in a straight line. A principle theme in Whiteread’s oeuvre, the new sculptures rely on form to reflect upon the surrounding negative space.

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Ed Ruscha, Baby Jet, 1998. Photo by Paul Ruscha, courtesy of Moderna Museet.

Currently on view at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, through September 5, is Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting. This exhibition, which is a collaboration with Hayward Gallery in London, shows more than 70 paintings. It spans the period from 1958, five years prior to his debut in 1963 at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, to the present day. Curated by Lars Nittve and Ann-Sofi Noring, the installation groups Ruscha’s works in chronological order so as to allow the viewer to see the development of the artist’s various motifs and styles over time.

The exhibition’s overarching theme, of course, is words and their constantly shifting relationships with context and message. As the curators explain, “In all his paintings there are tensions and frictions at play: between foreground and background, between text and image, and between how words look and what they mean.”

Installation shot, Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years Of Painting. Photo by Åsa Lundén, courtesy of Moderna Museet.

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Jorge Pardo, “Bulgogi” Installation View (2010) All images via Gagosian Gallery

“Bulgogi,” a solo exhibition featuring artist Jorge Pardo, is currently on view at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. The show’s title is derived from the name of a traditional Korean dish which translates as “fire meat.” Given the strong Korean presence in Los Angeles, Pardo uses this title as a metaphor for the cultural assimilation of Korean immigrants in this Californian city. The exhibition includes a variety of mixed media pieces, and features a range of objects including furniture, jewelry, and scrapbook images transformed into wallpaper.

Image from Bulgogi Installation.

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Untitled, Christopher Wool (2009). All images via Gagosian Gallery.

On view through July 30th at Gagosian Gallery in Rome is an exhibition of eight new paintings by New York artist Christopher Wool. In these new works, Wool continues to experiment with the fundamentals of abstract painting, while furthering his use of new tactics for application and negation. Adhering to a mostly black-and-white palette and an array of techniques including over-painting, silkscreen, spray paint, stenciling, rolling, dripping, dragging, reproduction and deletion, the past decade has seen Wool increasingly focus on the gestural and painterly qualities of his work.

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Claude Monet “Le pont japonais”, 1918-24. Oil on canvas, 35 x 39 1/2 inches, (89 x 100 cm). W.1924, MM 5091. Musee Marmatton Monet, Paris. Photo courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Erase from your mind what you knew about waterlilies. Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery’s location on 522 West 21st Street is Claude Monet: Late Works. Straying from the artist’s better-known pastel-infused palette, the exhibition brings together 27 late canvasses with bold hues and scintillating color combinations. Many of these paintings were never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime, and some remained hidden as recently as the 1950s. Beautifully curated by Monet scholar Paul Hayes Tucker, this exhibition follows in the line of museum-quality shows the Gagosian has mounted in recent years. The gallery’s walls, transformed into elegant lavenders and greys, serve as the perfect backdrop for these exquisitely raw landscapes.

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Roy Lichtenstein, Still Life with Palette, 1972, oil and magna on canvas, 60 x 96 inches. All images courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Recently opened at Gagosian Gallery‘s location on 555 West 24th Street is Roy Lichtenstein: Still Lifes. This exhibition is the first devoted solely to the artist’s still lifes spanning from 1972 to the early 1980s. The show, which brings together 50 works from prominent private collections and museums worldwide, includes still lifes in three media: paintings, sculptures and drawings.

Installation view, Roy Lichtenstein: Still Lifes

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Moon (2007) by Richard Prince, via Gagosian Gallery

Currently on view at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue Gallery in New York is “Tiffany Paintings” by Richard Prince. The exhibition includes recent large-scale paintings and newsprint collages which reflect the artist’s continual interest in the recurring patterns of advertising. These large monochrome abstract paintings recall the Tiffany’s advertisement which was run daily for many years in the upper right hand corner of the same page of the New York Times.

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All photographs by Oskar Proctor for ArtObserved

Currently on view at Hauser & Wirth New York is “Else,” the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to the drawings of Roni Horn.  The show, composed of six new large-scale works up to eight by ten feet in size, will remain on view through June 19, 2010 at 32 East 69th Street.

The new works lend themselves to multiple viewing angles: from far away they appear as densely-packed thumbprints and dissipating hearts. A closer look reveals involved diagrams reminiscent of tesselations and multiplying cells. The heavily textured images are composed of cut paper, red painted lines, and the artist’s fractured pencil notes. Ever aware of the material, the stamp of the paper manufacturer feature prominently on the outer edges of several works. The intricacy and density of the compositions are contrasted with the artist’s simple, large scrawled signature, which floats, relaxed, detached from the rest in a sea of oaktag.

Björk at Friday night’s opening

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Faunes et chèvres by Pablo Picasso  1959   All images via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery, 3 Merlin Street, Athens is an exhibition titled ” Pablo Picasso:Experiments in Linogravure”. This comprehensive  show explores the late Picasso’s experiments with linogravure, a particular kind of printing technique that he favored during the final years of his creative activity. The exhibition is on view until May 1, 2010.

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Five Points/Triangles by Alexander Calder, 1957
All images via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery, New York is an exhibition of the large-format sculptures of Alexander Calder, produced between 1957 and 1970. The exhibition pays tribute to the late oeuvre of this renowned American sculptor, illuminating the period when Calder almost exclusively dedicated himself to sculpture of monumental proportions – the genre that brought him the international acclaim.

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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.

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Gagosian Gallery, 17-19 Davies Street, London. All images via Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise noted.

Starting February 10, Gagosian Gallery at 17-19 Davies Street, London holds the exhibition entitled “Arshile Gorky: Virginia Summer 1946″, featuring works on paper by the renowned Armenian-American artist. The exhibition at Gagosian Gallery coincides with the major retrospective at Tate Modern, London that includes 178 works by the artist and covers his entire career. The show at Gagosian focuses on the works produced by Gorky during the summer of 1946, when the artist was recovering from a cancer operation in a remote farmhouse in Virginia. Still too weak to paint, Gorky produced three hundred works on paper during that summer, fourteen of which are on display at Gagosian Gallery.

Untitled (Last Painting), Arshile Gorky, 1948

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Sighicelli, Untitled (White) 2006

Currently showing at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue  is an exhibition of work by Elisa Sighicelli entitled ‘The Party is Over.’  The show encompasses nine photographic works and two video installations that explore themes of stillness and motion – specifically, of places ‘suspended in time.’ Sighicelli’s images capture a variety of structures, from billboards and a planetarium to tangles of bamboo scaffolding against a building. Different qualities of light are used in each piece to convey the information of an infrastructure in all it’s mood and glare – materials of metal and concrete begin to take on emotional qualities. “I always think of my photos as shot by an alien somehow– you have a feeling of displacement, but at the same time you think you recognize something…”

Sighicelli, Untitled (Empty Square) 2009 Via Gagosian

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Aaron Young, You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, 2009. [Gagosian Gallery]

Aaron Young, the so-called “Hellraiser” (Christopher Mooney, ArtReview), shakes-up the Beverley Hills neighborhood with his uniquely American brand of biker-nihilism. With a proliferation of riotous and destructive objects, including life-size wrecking balls and battered iron barricades, casually littering the gallery floor one would initially interpret this exhibit as a punks advert for hard living. Yet the sadist exterior gives way to a masochistic interior: the wrecking ball is made of glass, bound for self-destruction if it ever fulfilled its function; similarly the razor-wire sculptures have a soft core, made from delicate Murano glass, and turned on its side to become sculptural; the barricades are made of plated gold not iron, they are precious rather ruined

Goner, 2009. [Gagosian Gallery]

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End of an Era (2009) by Damien Hirst, via the Gagosian Gallery

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue are new sculptures and paintings by Damien Hirst.  The exhibition takes its title, “End of an Era,” from the central sculpture of the exhibition: a severed bull’s head with golden horns and a solid gold circular disc cast in formaldehyde and encased in a gold vitrine on a marble pedestal.  Hirst’s September 2008 monumental Sotheby’s London auction, where he famously circumvented his dealers, is widely recognized as marking the top of the recent art market rise. In this this auction the centerpiece was the “The Golden Calf” which sold for £10,345,250 with buyer’s premium and was cited as a reference to Hirst’s representation of cultural excess, worshipping false idols and likely Hirst’s own myth making.  The current exhibition title, and the decapitated head of basically the same artistic work, certainly has Hirst again presenting self-referential messages in light of his work’s current cultural and economic context.

Painful Memories/ Forgotten Tears (2008) by Damien Hirst, via Gagosian Gallery

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An installation view of Kusama’s ‘I want to Live Forever’ exhibit in Milan

Currently showing at Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan is an exhibition by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, entitled ‘I Want to Live Forever.’  The show focuses on the artist’ s figurative paintings, large-scale sculpture and installations from the last decade, along with more formative drawings from the 50’s and 60’s.  Also on show is ‘Narcissus Garden,’  a sculptural installation consisting of an interactive environment of 1,500 mirror balls mounted in a field.  The work was first exhibited at the 33rd Biennale di Venezia in 1966– breaking away  from the usual ‘covert commercial aspects’ of the Biennale, Kusama, (known for her talent in merchandising), dressed in a traditional Japanese Kimono and sold each mirror ball for 1,200 lire on the lawns of the Italian Pavilion. More than forty years later, the installation piece now comes to Milan for the first time. Qualities of Kusama’s work are driven by a mental illness (hallucinations and obsessive thoughts) that the artist has struggled with since childhood. Her art often reveals an obsession  for filling spaces with repetitive, identical patterns. Early on in her career, she began covering surfaces with the polka-dots that would eventually become the trademark of her work. These fields of polka-dots, or ‘infinity nets,’ were drawn directly from her hallucinations. “These strange, uncanny things…drove me half into madness for many years,” the artist has said. “The only way to free myself from them was to control them myself–by reproducing them on paper…”

Kusama’s interactive ‘Narcissus Garden,’ consists of 1500 mirror balls. 2009, Via Design Boom

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La Grande Vitesse (1969) by Alexander Calder via Palazzo delle Esposizioni

Currently on view in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, through February 14, is a complete retrospective on Alexander Calder (1898-1976) that surpasses any show dedicated to the artist in Italy during the past three decades. Running concurrently with the Gagosian Gallery’s exhibition Monumental Sculpture (through January 30) and borrowing works from the Museum of Modern Art, Foundation Solomon R. Guggenheim, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Center Pompidou and Calder Foundation collections, the exhibition pays tribute to the American master’s legacy, framing him chronologically through more than 150 works. Alongside the artist’s highly recognizable, deftly engineered wire mobiles and sculptures are lesser-known works, including installations, toys and paintings circa 1930, to provide theoretical counterpoints and pivot points in his career.

Blue Feather (1948) by Alexander Calder via Palazzo delle Esposizioni

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Girl Woods (2008) by Jeff Koons, via Gagosian Gallery

Currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills is “New Paintings” by Jeff Koons.  This new body of work suggests a departure from the artist’s usual rendering of familiar yet banal objects within glossy surface textures. These works appear to be more literal, abstract and gestural yet also follow the tradition of figurative painting.  They also engage in a dialogue that is cultural and intellectual by referencing major figures in modern art such as Gustave Coubet and Salvador Dali.

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Mike Kelley, “Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms,” (2009) Via Gagosian.

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On the back side of “Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms,” are TV color bars, interspersed with videos depicting family life found on YouTube. (2009) Via Gagosian.

Currently showing at Gagosian Gallery in New York is an exhibition of paintings by Mike Kelley entitled “Horizontal Tracking Shots.” The show is Kelley’s first exhibit in New York which is devoted solely to paintings. In the past, his collaborative and solo shows have involved elaborate multimedia sets, symbolic performance art, theatrical spectacles, drawings and installation works. This body of work grew out of one of Kelley’s previous exhibitions entitled “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions,” a kind of auto-biographical, multi-faceted project that began in 1995, involving sculpture, video narrative and themes of trauma and repressed memory.

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Rouge Triomphant (Triumphant Red) (1959-1963) by Alexander Calder, via Gagosian Gallery

Currently on view at the Gagosian gallery in Rome is ‘Monumental Sculpture’ by Alexander Calder.  Taking place at the same time as the current Calder retrospective at the Scuderie Quirinale, also in Rome, the Gagosian Gallery displays an exhibition of the artist’s monumental sculpture created between 1948 and 1964.

Press Release [Gagosian Gallery]
Alexander Calder: Monumental Sculpture [In Rome Now]

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Installation view of Ed Ruscha’s artist book: On the Road by Jack Kerouak

For the Los Angeles based artist Ed Ruscha, the road carries a symbolic connection to his artistic beginnings as well as the culture in which he thrives. His intimate reflection on the aesthetic and emotion of traveling or just the nature of moving from one point to another is the subject of a book tribute to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and an exhibition at Gagosian gallery in London. Ruscha’s work is also presented in a large retrospective of the artist’s ouevre at the Hayward Gallery in Mayfair.  Both shows reflect a trajectory and development of one of the most groundbreaking American artist of the 20th century. Tha Gagosian Gallery show runs through November 28th and the Hayward retrospective ends on January 10th, 2010.

An artist’s book of the classic novel by Jack Kerouac “On the Road,” 2009. Ed Ruscha via Gagosian Gallery
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Richard Serra’s ‘Opened Ended’ via Gagosian Gallery

On view now at Gagosian Gallery‘s West 21st Street location are two large sculptures by Richard Serra. ‘Blind Spot’ and ‘Open Ended’ are similar concentric structures each made of six weatherproof steel plates. ‘Open Ended’ was first exhibited at Gagosian’s London gallery last year and this current exhibition marks the New York debut of both works.

Richard Serra: Blind Spot/Open Ended [Gagosian]
Recent Richard Serra Sculptures Coming to Chelsea [L Magazine]

Richard Serra’s ‘Blind Spot’ via Gagosian Gallery

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