Derrick Adams Flirts With the Idea of Sensuality in Come as You Are @ Gagosian in Los Angeles

 

Derrick Adams, Be the Table, 2023. © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Jeff McLane

 

In Derrick Adams’ debut exhibition with the Gagosian, the artist continues to develop pictorial vignettes centering the Black figure, this time in new works borne from the artist’s imagined invitation to the real or fictional personalities he paints.

The exhibition’s title offers encouragement to be present without the need to conceal one’s true self, dreams, and aspirations—a prompt to shed the pressures of adaptation and conformity. Adams counters hackneyed narratives by presenting figures in moments of carefree leisure, inspired by his belief in the constructive power of scenes that uplift and support Black culture. Adding elements of fantastical daydreams along with a few icons familiar from previous series, he dramatizes lived experience and self-actualization in compositions that balance vivid and muted tones, flat planes and multidimensional space.

Come as You Are is on view through October 28 @ Gagosian, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills

Tom Wesselmann's "Intimate Spaces" Opens @ Gagosian in Los Angeles

A large painting of lips smoking a cigarette. Smoker #8, 1973 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York, Photo: Jeffrey Sturges, Courtesy the Estate and Gagosian

Smoker #8, 1973 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York, Photo: Jeffrey Sturges, Courtesy the Estate and Gagosian

A defining artist of American Pop Art, Tom Wesselmann produced innovative mixed-media paintings that brought the energy of commercial culture to still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and nudes. The exhibition—Intimate Spaces—concentrates on the artist’s primary subject, the female nude, with key works from Great American Nudes (1961–73) and subsequent series. With a nod to both the great American novel and the American dream, Great American Nudes also refers to Wesselmann’s affinity for the scale of Abstract Expressionist paintings, billboards, and movie screens. Inspired by Henri Matisse’s odalisques, Wesselmann employed a saturated palette, clearly defined contours, and interlocking positive and negative shapes. The paintings are set in domestic interiors and often incorporate collage and assemblage elements, appearing highly contemporary in their provocative discontinuities of style.

Wesselmann’s nudes became icons of the 1960s sexual revolution. Wishing to avoid portraiture, the artist frequently deemphasized facial features, foregrounding both abstraction and overt eroticism. “The figures dealt primarily with their presence,” he wrote (as his pseudonym, Slim Stealingworth). “Personality would interfere with the bluntness of the fact of the nude. When body features were included, they were those important to erotic simplification, like lips and nipples. There was no modeling, no hint at dimension.”

Intimate Spaces is on view through June 16 @ Gagosian 456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills

Frieze London Opens to Large Crowds With Visceral Sensations

Installation view, Patricia Domínguez solo exhibition “Indra’s Net,” curated by Sandhini Poddar, Cecilia Brunson Projects Frieze London booth 2022, Courtesy Cecilia Brunson Projects.
Photograph by Eva Herzog


text by Jennifer Piejko


The early crowd snaked through Regent’s Park in central London, pouring into the tents of the 19th annual Frieze Art Fair from the moment the doors opened. After a string of quiet art-fair seasons, the morning circus of 160 temporary galleries, pop-up cafes (city favorites Petersham Nurseries, Jikoni, and Bao among them) and champagne counters was seemingly full from day to evening.

Perhaps the nearly three years of online viewing rooms, PDF sales lists, and isolation have left us with a longing for the deeply personal as well as the three-dimensional, as the engaging paintings on view leaned into the visceral, from Romanian painter Marius Bercea’s wistful portraits of friends and figures, mostly women, from his native Cluj at Los Angeles and New York gallery François Ghebaly. Hints of the seams of social construction—such as the aftereffects of the country’s 1989 revolution and the resulting creep of consumer capitalism into Romanian society, modern femininity and womanhood, and alienation—are disclosed in the details of his paintings, whose stylings recall paintings by Impressionist artist Mary Cassat and Milan Kundera films. 

 

Marius Bercea
Untitled, 2022
Oil on canvas
40 x 50 cm
Courtesy François Ghebaly Gallery © Marius Bercea

 

Warsaw and Cologne gallery Wschód present a series of canvases by Polish artist Joanna Woś that depicts scenes from Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi’s fresco The Feast of Herod (1466), part of Stories of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist inside the Prato Cathedral in Tuscany. The diaphanous figures in shades from sand to terra cotta share side glances and intimacies while seeing right past and through each other. At the other end of the scale, Gagosian presents a towering row of seven paintings by British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, timed with her solo exhibition “Can we see the colour green because we have a name for it?” at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Neon lines and forms of abstracted foliage race across the canvas in pure, frantic saturation. 

Installation View, Joanna Woś, Galeria Wschód Frieze London booth 2022

Reaching out to visitors, works highlighting texture and dimensionality filled the fair, begging to be touched or crinkled in the hand: Shin Sung Hy at Gallery Hyundai (Seoul), Suki Seokyeong Kang at Tina Kim Gallery (New York), Joanna Piotrowska at Phillida Reid (London), Barbara Bloom and Karla Black at Gisela Capitain (Cologne), Acaye Kerunen at Pace, Rossella Biscotti at mor charpentier (Paris and Bogotá). It’s a scandalous feeling now that we’ve gotten accustomed to mediating nearly every work through a digital screen.

Installation View, Acaye Kerunen at Pace Gallery Frieze London booth 2022 © Pace Gallery, London 2022 
Photograph by Damian Griffiths, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Among the fair’s usual sections Focus and Editions, this year’s special section is “Indra’s Net,” curated by Sandhini Poddar from the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi. Titled after the ancient Buddhist and Hindu concept of dependent origination, illustrated by intertwined cords that hold a multifaceted jewel at each knot, where each jewel reflects every other jewel, connecting the entire universe. Works included here reflect connections and exchanges in language, history, ancestry, consciousness, and futurity. At New York gallery Jack Shainman’s booth, Richard Mosse’s work Flooded Municipality, Amazonas captures the environmental damage inflicted on the Brazilian Amazon in the craggy reds and blacks that eat away at a flooded residential neighborhood, chronicling ecocide by drone in his signature conceptual photographic technique. At London gallery Cecilia Brunson Projects, Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez’s works stem from her interest in fantastical ethnobotany. Trained in botanical illustration, she used her recent artistic residency at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland and time with a Peruvian plant healer to inform the hybrid foliage-and-black box paintings (with gemstones), sculptures, and video here. Seen together, it might offer a roadmap into our next dimension. See you in the line to get in there, too.  

Gagosian Presents MAN RAY "The Mysteries of Château du Dé" in San Francisco

During his storied career, Man Ray, a multidisciplinary artist with a rare breadth, worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, film, poetry, and prose. While for him photography and painting were paramount, his work in early film and cinema is often overlooked.

Man Ray’s first experience in making film was in New York, in 1920, when he worked with Marcel Duchamp on an unsuccessful attempt to create a three-dimensional film. After moving to Paris, in 1921, his diverse experimentation in the medium of photography eventually led him back to the moving image.

the exhibition also includes objects, drawings, and photography. Moving fluidly between media, Man Ray often made several iterations of a work—photographing it, assembling and disassembling, or making multiples—reproduction being crucial to his concept of the art object. Throughout his vast body of work, Man Ray alluded to relationships between the real and the fictive, the literal and the imaginative, with a deft mastery over the liminal territory between the abstract and the figurative form.

The Mysteries of Château du Dé will be on view throughout February 29, 2020 at Gagosian 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Richard Serra: Forged Rounds @ Gagosian In New York

Photo: Silke von Berswordt. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.

Four new works from Richard Serra’s Rounds series fills the entire West 24th Street gallery. Each forged steel sculpture is composed of multiple -ton elements of differing diameters and heights. Bisecting the West st Street gallery space will be Reverse Curve, a sculpture measuring feet long and feet high. Originally conceived in for a public project in Reggio Emilia, Italy, Reverse Curve is finally being realized for the first time. In conjunction with these exhibitions, Gagosian and Anthology Film Archives will present a three day retrospective of Serra’s films and videos from October 17 through 19, drawn from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Joan Jonas, and Stiftung Situation Kunst. This is the first time that all of the artist’s film and video work will be shown together. The screening on October will be followed by a panel discussion between curators Søren Grammel, Chrissie Iles, and Jeffrey Weiss, moderated by art historian Benjamin Buchloh. Additional screenings of the full program will take place on October 20 and 23. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Julian Rose. Forged Rounds is on view through December 17 at Gagosian 555 West 24th Street, New York.

Ed Ruscha: Eilshemius & Me @ Gagosian in London

Gagosian presents Ed Ruscha: Eilshemius & Me, an exhibition of works by Ed Ruscha and Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864–1941). In the exhibition, landscape emerges as a set of ideas rather than a dutiful imitation of reality. The picture’s frame, whether physically real or illusionistically painted, isolates the painter’s vision, demarcating and confining it, almost like a theater curtain or the contracting aperture of a camera lens over a silent film—slowly revealing the plane on which the artist’s storytelling will take place, ready to contract again when the story is told.

Eilshemius & Me is on view through August 2 at Gagosian 17–19 Davies Street London W1K 3DE, UK. photographs courtesy of Gagosian

Francis Bacon: Couplings @ Gagosian in London

Gagosian presents Couplings, an exhibition of Francis Bacon’s double-figure paintings. Bacon’s disturbing images—his portrayals of friends and fellow artists, and the deformations and stylistic distortions of classical subjects—radically altered the genre of figurative painting in the twentieth century. In Bacon’s paintings, the human presence is evoked sometimes viscerally, at other times more fleetingly, in the form of a shadow or a blurred, watchful figure. In certain instances, the portrayal takes the form of a composite in which male and female bodily traits are transposed or fused. This selective exhibition explores a theme that preoccupied Bacon throughout his career: the relationship between two people, both physical and psychological.

Couplings is on view through August 3 at Gagosian 20 Grosvenor Hill, London W1K 3QD, UK. all images courtesy of Gagosian

Harmony Korine Presents "Young Twitchy" @ Gagosian In New York


”The works were re-created in oil paint on canvas from images I constructed on my iPhone. I usually took these photographs around my home in Florida, and then painted over them with different characters. These light creatures hang out with the dogs, or dance on the abandoned boat dock. I would sit outside alone by the water and create alien-like friends on a low-key cosmic tropical playground.” —Harmony Korine. Young Twitchy is on view through April 20 at Gagosian 980 Madison Avenue, New York. photographs courtesy of Gagosian

Nate Lowman Presents "Never Remember" @ Gagosian In New York

Never Remember—the exhibition title a biting reversal of the slogan “Never forget”—takes place in the very gallery where Jasper Johns’s map paintings were shown thirty years before. Lowman’s Maps expand on his own shaped canvases begun in the early 2000s, depicting doodled hearts, trompe l’oeil decals of bullet holes, and air freshener trees. 

Lowman’s Maps infuse the geometries of the United States with a gritty, gestural tactility, combining chance and intention in the generative possibilities of a single form. With sharp political skepticism, Lowman employs abstraction to point to the arbitrariness of borders and the limitations of jingoism, thus expounding on the complexities and contradictions of the American way. Never Remember is on view through December 15 at Gagosian 980 Madison Avenue, New York. photographs courtesy Gagosian

Jeff Koons Exhibition Of New And Recent Works @ Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles

Gagosian presents an exhibition of recent and new work by Jeff Koons. Making use of conceptual constructs including the ancient, the everyday, and the sublime, Koons creates luxurious icons and elaborate tableaux, which, beneath their captivating exteriors, engage the viewer in a metaphysical dialogue with cultural history. The exhibition will be on view until August 18, 2017 at Gagosian Beverly Hills. photographs by Bianca Vázquez

Katharina Grosse Exhibition @ Gagosian Gallery in New York

Gagosian present new paintings and sculpture by Katharina Grosse. A prominent figure on the international art circuit, this is her first gallery exhibition in New York and at Gagosian, following a series of significant public commissions in the U.S. in recent years. Grosse approaches painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity. With a spray gun, she disconnects the artistic act from the hand, stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark. The resulting pictures are distinct, but never predetermined. Spatial tensions rise through shifts in chromatic temperature. Challenging boundaries, she reintroduces her body as an active agent within a vision of contemporary existence that is at once physically isolated and densely networked. On view until March 19, at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Ed Ruscha Books & Co. @ Gagosian Gallery In Los Angeles

Gagosian Gallery presents “Ed Ruscha Books & Co.,” an exhibition of artists' books by and after Ed Ruscha. The exhibition is organized by Gagosian director Bob Monk. In the 1960s, Ruscha was credited with reinventing the artist's book, producing and self-publishing a series of slim volumes of photography and text. By turning away from the craftsmanship and luxury status that typified the livre d'artiste in favor of the artistic idea or concept, expressed simply and in editions that were unsigned and inexpensively printed, Ruscha opened the genre to the possibilities of mass-production and distribution. “Ed Ruscha Books & Co.” presents Ruscha's iconic books together with those of more than one hundred artists from all over the world—from Russia to Japan to the Netherlands—who have responded directly and diversely to his lead. Many books are installed so that viewers can browse their pages. After presentations in New York, Munich and Paris (2013–15) the exhibition run will conclude in Ruscha's home city of Los Angeles. The exhibition will be presented in conjunction with “Ed Ruscha Prints and Photographs.” Ed Ruscha Books & Co. will be on view until September 9, 2016 at Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive

Jeff Koons "Gazing Ball Paintings" @ Gagosian Gallery In New York

Jeff Koons’ newest exhibition Gazing Ball Paintings opened Thursday at Gagosian in New York. The exhibit presents Koons’ newest series of paintings entitled Gazing Ball, for which he recreated art historical paintings and inserted a glass-blown blue ball on a small shelve onto each canvas.  The selection of paintings represents Koons’ personal favorites, which he aims to make stronger by creating a dialogue between the viewer, the work and the space through the reflection on its surface. The blue balls hover in front of masterpieces such as Édouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which the artist purposefully did not copy one for one but are there to create the idea of a painting. The flat paintings achieved to confuse some viewers about their authenticity, spark indignation, and the presumption that these paintings needed improvement outraged others. The reflection is reminiscent of a fun-house mirror, and according to the press release, creates a metaphysical occurrence, which connects the viewer to a family of cultural history in real time. Koons seems to have a preference for sexually charged scenes, epitomizing the male gaze even further, by the often unfortunate positions of the balls and their reflections. One disturbing example is Gustave Courbert’s Le Sommeil where the gazing ball is placed right between the legs of one of the figures.  Overall, the exhibit was in line with Koons child-like mentality and left the viewers curious and apprehensive of what can be expected of the artist in the future. Jeff Koons "Gazing Ball Paintings" will be on view until December 23, 2015 at Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, New York. photographs and text by Adriana Pauly

Gagosian Beverly Hills 20-Year Anniversary Invitational Exhibition in Los Angeles

To mark the twentieth anniversary of Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills on North Camden Drive, founder Larry Gagosian has selected a special exhibition of works by more than thirty artists spanning three generations. Born in Los Angeles, Gagosian opened his first galleries on Almont Drive and Robertson Boulevard in the early 1980s. Chris Burden and Jean-Michel Basquiat were among the first artists to be exhibited. Drawing on the city's abundance of talented artists, Gagosian was at the forefront of developing a bicoastal model for contemporary art galleries—the beginning of a global expansion that now numbers fifteen galleries in three continents—when he moved to New York in 1985 and opened his first gallery there, in collaboration with Leo Castelli. Los Angeles provided both artists and galleries with an ideal infrastructure for creating and exhibiting diverse bodies of artwork, sometimes on a very large scale, and in 1995 Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills, designed by acclaimed American architect Richard Meier, opened with new sculptures by Frank Stella. The Beverly Hills 20-Year Anniversary Invitational Exhibition will be on view until December 19, at Gagosian Beverly Hills, 456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills, CA

Michael Heizer 'Altars' @ Gagosian Gallery in New York

Gagosian presents the work of legendary sculptor Michael Heizer. Heizer's first exhibition with the gallery comprises rarely or never-before-seen early paintings, the Altar series of new monumental steel sculptures, and negative wall sculptures featuring metamorphic and igneous rocks. Working largely outside the confines of gallery and museum, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. In the late 1960s, he relocated to New York, while continuing to travel and live in the open terrain of the American West, where he has since created awe-inspiring land artworks. Michael Heizer 'Altars' will be on view until July 9, 2015 at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York. photographs by Eric Minh Swenson

R.I.P. Chris Burden, Extreme Performance Artist (1946-2015)

Chris Burden, an artist known for his extreme performance art in his youth - with performances that included shooting himself in the arm with a rifle and crucifying himself on a VW Bug - has died at the age of 69 in Los Angeles. Later in his life, Burden became more well known for his sculptural works, like the famous streetlamp installation outside of LACMA and Porsche with Meteorite, which is on view now at Gagosian Gallery in Paris. Burden has made an indelible mark on the history of art and he will be an enduring symbol and spirit of how far bravery, imagination and a little pain can take the artist.