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

Read Bruce Licher's Remembrance of An Amazing Adventure In Calexico with the Late Chris Burden →

photograph by Bruce Licher

Chris Burden, who passed away a few days ago at his home in Topanga Canyon, California at the age of 69, was known for his performance art pieces that bordered on terrorism, like the time he took a pistol and fired several shots at a passenger airline taking off from LAX. In another piece, entitled Coals to Newcastle, which is a British idiom for doing something stupid or pointless, Burden sent a toy rubber-band model airplane with marijuana strapped to it over the border into Mexico. In the following eulogy of the late groundbreaking artist, Bruce Licher - a former student and founder of the LA post-punk band Savage Republic - describes his adventure in Calexico with Burden during the preparation and making of Coals to Newcastle. Read the whole story here. 

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. 

Chris Burden Exhibiting @ Gagosian in Paris

Chris Burden, Porsche with Meteorite, 2013, restored 1974, Courtesy of Artist and Gagosian

“Limits is a relative term. Like beauty, it is often in the eye of the beholder." Chris Burden Gagosian Paris presents works by Chris Burden, his first exhibition in Paris in more than twenty years. Since the 1970s, Burden has channeled the daring spirit of his early life-threatening performances into sculptures that embody technical feats on an imposing scale. Toys (figurines, train sets, Erector parts) are used as the building blocks for expansive scale models, cities, and battlefields, while actual vehicles (ships, trucks, and cars) are suspended or set in motion in surreal and improbable ways. The exhibition will be on view until July 24th at Gagosian Paris, 26 Avenue de l'Europe, Le Bourget

Performance Art: Chris Burden

"747" January 5, 1973 Los Angeles, California, at about 8am at a beach near the Los Angeles International Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747.

In 1971, during one of his most famous pieces, Chris Burden had his assistant shoot him in the arm from a distance of 5 meters with a riffle. “At 7:45 P.M. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” His life is seemingly an extreme case of Dadaist impulses and an insatiable thirst for danger; as well as the warm hard-on milking of the brain for adrenaline. Burden currently lives and works in Los Angeles.  You can find a book, an overview, of his works, here.