http://www.gagosian.com/ Gagosian Gallery News en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss exhibit-E.com http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/382784455/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/britannia-street-2008-10-richard-serra/
October 4 - December 20, 2008
Britannia Street Gallery

All formal openings to be held at Britannia Street
Opening preview October 3, 2008 (6 to 8 pm)
Press morning: October 3, 2008 (9 am to 12 pm)
Evening view: October 16, 2008 (6 to 10 pm)

Gagosian Gallery is presenting two concurrent exhibitions of new work by Richard Serra. Three new steel sculptures will be shown at the Britannia Street galleries together with "forged drawings" – small, geometric forged steel plates with paint stick applied to the surface.

At the same time, new works on paper will be shown at the Davies Street gallery. These are Serra's first exhibitions in London since Weight and Measure was presented in the Duveen Galleries at the Tate Gallery in 1992.

Born in 1939, Richard Serra is one of the most significant artists of his generation. His groundbreaking sculpture explores the exchange between artwork, site, and viewer. He has produced unparalleled large-scale, site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban and landscape settings. Earlier this year, he conceived Promenade, a course of five steel sculptural elements towering seventeen metres, for MONUMENTA at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Other recent projects include the eight-part permanent installation The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim Bilbao (2005) and a survey exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art (2007). Work comes out of work, an exhibition of works on paper 1989-2008, was presented this summer at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria.

The two exhibitions will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Kate Nesin. For further information please contact the gallery.

For all press inquiries please contact Erica Bolton/Charlotte Burns at Bolton & Quinn, +44.20.7221.5000 and for general information, contact Serena Cattaneo at Gagosian Gallery, +44.20.7841.9960.]]> Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:23:54 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/britannia-street-2008-10-richard-serra/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/396462869/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/davies-street-2008-10-richard-serra/
October 4 - November 22, 2008
Davies Street Gallery

All formal openings to be held at Britannia Street
Opening preview October 3, 2008 (6 to 8 pm)
Press morning: October 3, 2008 (9 am to 12 pm)
Evening view: October 16, 2008 (6 to 10 pm)

Gagosian Gallery is presenting two concurrent exhibitions of new work by Richard Serra. Three new steel sculptures will be shown at the Britannia Street galleries together with "forged drawings" – small, geometric forged steel plates with paint stick applied to the surface.

At the same time, new works on paper will be shown at the Davies Street gallery. These are Serra's first exhibitions in London since Weight and Measure was presented in the Duveen Galleries at the Tate Gallery in 1992.

Born in 1939, Richard Serra is one of the most significant artists of his generation. His groundbreaking sculpture explores the exchange between artwork, site, and viewer. He has produced unparalleled large-scale, site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban and landscape settings. Earlier this year, he conceived Promenade, a course of five steel sculptural elements towering seventeen metres, for MONUMENTA at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Other recent projects include the eight-part permanent installation The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim Bilbao (2005) and a survey exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art (2007). Work comes out of work, an exhibition of works on paper 1989-2008, was presented this summer at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria.

The two exhibitions will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Kate Nesin. For further information please contact the gallery.

For all press inquiries please contact Erica Bolton/Charlotte Burns at Bolton & Quinn, +44.20.7221.5000 and for general information, contact Serena Cattaneo at Gagosian Gallery, +44.20.7841.9960.]]> Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:27:35 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/davies-street-2008-10-richard-serra/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/374599968/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/madison-avenue-2008-09-untitled-vicarious/
September 23 - December 20, 2008
Madison Avenue Gallery

Opening reception: Tuesday, September 23rd, from 6 to 8 pm


I never thought of a picture as being bodiless, but rather as existing within a process of transformation of three dimensions to two.
--Wolfgang Tillmans

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce Untitled (Vicarious), an exhibition of photographs by Roger Ballen, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Demand, Shannon Ebner, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Anne Hardy, Leslie Hewitt, László Moholy-Nagy, Carter Mull, Vik Muniz, Hélio Oiticica & Neville D'Almeida, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wolfgang Tillmans, Sara VanDerBeek, and James Welling.

Untitled (Vicarious) explores the defining relationship between sculpture and photography as exemplified by a group of artists spanning several generations. Central to the exhibition is the dematerialization of the object via the process of its being photographed: the artists create and photograph constructions, choosing to exhibit the resulting representations rather than the original objects. Whether they are sculptures, staged scenarios, or momentary interventions, the conflation of the inherent three-dimensionality of the sculptural form and the rendered two-dimensionality of the final photograph defies easy categorization. One is forced to recognize the object as an entity that cannot be viewed firsthand but only experienced vicariously via secondary photographic incarnations.

For the greater part of the twentieth century, artists have used photography to define their constructions through the lens of the camera rather than through physical proximity. Some of the first practitioners of this mode of representation have been sculptors. David Smith's photographs are remarkable for their attention to objects and their positioning, reflecting on the sculptural possibilities and perceptual impact of photography; László Moholy–Nagy designed sets for his sculptures, adjusting the light conditions to present an object-based perception of his work within the confines of a two-dimensional format, thus creating a separate experience unique to the photograph that could not be replicated in three dimensions.

As conceptual art eschewed the traditional boundaries of defined mediums, artists began to question how a sculpture could be experienced, and the methods by which that experience could be controlled. Hélio Oiticica & Neville D'Almeida's collaborative efforts conflated sculpture and photography while simultaneously acknowledging and negating the power of pop culture; Fischli & Weiss incorporated industrial and, in many cases, perishable items into tenuous and transitory constructions with slyly evocative titles; Cindy Sherman's disturbingly manipulated anatomical models propose subversions and perversions of traditional constructions of sexuality.

Re-imagined landscapes, both interior and exterior, form the basis of many of these vicarious images. Thomas Demand's environments, reconstructed meticulously in paper and cardboard, commemorate historical events, sites, and phenomena, such as KFC (2007), a subtle critique of global consumption; Hiroshi Sugimoto's subtly modulated color photographs establish a sense of depth with shadow-filled crevices designed and constructed to enhance the sculptural effects of a completely white room; Roger Ballen's tableaux utilize variations in texture, tone and materials to create deeply psychological interactions, unsettling studies of his South African experience; Wolfgang Tillmans's photographs and photographic installations show him working to create an expanded field for his chosen medium. Whether exposed photo-sensitive materials or images of all manner of still lifes they reveal the mental leap required to move from three dimensions into two.

For a younger generation, these recently established practices have in turn become subjects and sources. Sara Greenberger Rafferty uses the traditionally sterile tropes associated with comedy and magic, in this instance in the forms of pies and playing cards, literally tearing the picture plane to underscore the idea of these images being both objects and images; for Carter Mull, photography is a not so much a transparent truth-telling device as it is a kind of inherently constructed material theater originating in the photographic apparatus; Sara VanDerBeek's six-part work Four Photographers (2008) comprises hand-cast plaster slabs referencing fragments of architectural friezes. She layers these with sheets of glass upon which is a sequence of images by Man Ray, Julia Margaret Cameron, and her father Stan VanDerBeek-- the fourth photographer being Sara herself. Shannon Ebner's Shrouded Monument (2008), a makeshift construction made of cinder blocks spelling out U S A, suggests the fragility of sculptural forms as analogy for systems of government.

For further information, please contact the gallery.]]> Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:50:19 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/madison-avenue-2008-09-untitled-vicarious/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/420932458/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/galerie-patrick-seguin-2008-10-richard-prince/
October 23 - November 29, 2008
GALERIE PATRICK SEGUIN Gallery

"A day in the life of a book collector suggests that the impulses behind collecting are part obsession, part quest and part fantasy."
--Richard Prince

Galerie Patrick Seguin, Paris, in collaboration with Gagosian Gallery, is pleased to present a new series of work by Richard Prince. This will be the artist's first exhibition at Galerie Patrick Seguin, which focuses on 20th century furniture and architecture.

This new series of sculptural assemblages was born out of Prince's avid book collecting. For many years Richard Prince's extensive collection of rare books has inspired his work, most notable the Nurse paintings. In this series, his book collection has become an integral part of the work. The furniture Prince acquired for his substantial library was inevitably used to display books, and gradually he began to see the objects as pedestals. He then expanded the idea to include daybeds and sofas as a means of presentation. Pairing mid-century modern furniture with books, his own double-sided Publicities and other printed and literary material, Prince has created unified sculpture out of disparate objects.

The exhibition will also include Nurse Hat Chair. The chair is an edition of 7, designed by Richard Prince, and based on a nurse's white hat, appropriating his own icon from his series of Nurse paintings.

Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and lives and works in upstate New York. Previous major exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Kuntsmuseum Wolfsburg and the Serpentine Gallery, London. A retrospective survey organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2007 traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.]]> Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:36:03 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/galerie-patrick-seguin-2008-10-richard-prince/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/439228405/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-04_richard-serra/
November 4 - December 20, 2008
Madison Avenue Gallery

"There is no way to make a drawing – there is only drawing."
--Richard Serra

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present Solids, a recent sequence of twenty-five drawings by Richard Serra. Solids was first shown in "Work comes out of work," Serra's comprehensive drawing exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz earlier this year.

As in his earlier series Line Drawings (2000-2002) and Tracks (2007-2008), the process that Serra uses to make Solids is one where the action of marking contrasts with somewhat blind accumulation. Melted paintstick is poured onto a hard surface on the floor or a table. Sometimes a sheet of window-screen is placed on top of the liquid paintstick. Then the paper is laid down, either on top of the screen or directly on top of the liquid paintstick. Pressure is exerted on the back of the paper with a hard marking tool and the front side of the paper picks up the mark. In this series no direct drawing is done on the front of the paper. Therefore it is not possible to see the drawing until the paper is pulled off the floor or the table and turned over or the screen is lifted. In the Solids series, as the layering of gesture increases, so does the accumulated mass and perceived weight. The effects of compression, torsion, the surface tension of the material and, finally, gravity, all work, as the paintstick coalesces to produce widely varying surface textures.

Serra makes drawings not as precursors to sculptural works, but as separate, immediate, and fundamental lines of investigation, translating intentions into marks. The drawings are explorations in their own right and they can be seen as both integral to the overall concerns of the sculptor's practice as well as unique intuitive explorations within their own set criteria.

Born in 1939, Richard Serra is one of the most significant artists of his generation. His groundbreaking sculpture explores the exchange between artwork, site, and viewer. He has produced large-scale, site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban, and landscape settings spanning the globe, from Iceland to New Zealand. Earlier this year, he conceived Promenade, a course of five steel sculptural elements towering seventeen meters, for MONUMENTA at the Grand Palais in Paris. In addition to the drawing retrospective "Work comes out of work" at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008), other recent projects include the eight-part permanent installation The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim Bilbao (2005) and "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years" at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007).

For more information, please contact Melissa Passman at 212.741.1111 or mpassman@gagosian.com.]]> Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:43:44 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-04_richard-serra/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/442486880/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-06_rachel-whiteread/
November 6 - December 20, 2008
Beverly Hills Gallery

Opening reception for the artist: Thursday, November 6th, from 6 to 8 pm


"Color confuses me. Every day when I get up, I have to think
about it. I love color, but there are too many decisions to make.
Am I an aesthete? Is color about necessity for me in my work—
Or is it simply a product of what I am thinking about?

I try not to dwell on it; if I did, I would only ever use black and
white."

--Rachel Whiteread


Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculpture by Rachel Whiteread. This will be the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

For the past two decades, Whiteread has developed various approaches to casting and impression as both a process and vehicle for content. Her practice is based on a persistent duality: a pragmatic approach to the materials and making of art coupled with a fascination for the psychologically charged associations and traces of human contact borne by and embedded in objects and environments. By casting the empty and unexamined spaces inside and around the domestic objects and materials that populate daily life, she renders negative space as positive sculptural form to poignant and unprecedented effect.

In recent years, Whiteread has moved away from the monolithic, architectural, and site-specific sculptures for which she became so renowned, such as Ghost (1990), House (1993) and Basement (2001), returning to a more intimate scale to explore the mutable nature of mass-produced vessels and materials. Her ensembles of cast packaging in delicately modulated hues of white, ranged on tables and shelves or leaned casually against the wall, have prompted comparison with the work of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, whose simple and repetitive motifs -- bottles, jars, and vases -- and restrained use of color, value, and compositional balance made him a prescient and important forerunner of Minimalism.

In the current work, Whiteread has passed beyond her characteristically muted and spectral palette, exploring the conventions of still life in a more relaxed and exuberant mood. Casting all manner of small packing boxes, containers and discarded materials in vividly pigmented plaster and jelly-hued resin -- acid greens, watery blues, deep amber, rose, tangerine, and saffron -- she has assembled animated groupings of the resulting objects on wall-mounted shelves or set them casually on low bronze plinths and tubular steel chair frames. Immortalized vestiges of today's avid consumer culture, these tableaux are Whiteread's wry, sometimes inverse reflections on the role of color in art and life.

Rachel Whiteread was born in London in 1963. Her work has been exhibited internationally in many solo and group exhibitions including the British Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2001), Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2001), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2002), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2005), and MADRE, Naples (2007). She has also produced notable temporary public commissions such as House (London, 1993), Water Tower (New York, 1998), Monument (London, 2001), and Embankment at Tate Modern, 2005. In 1996 she received the controversial commission for Holocaust Memorial at the Judenplatz in Vienna, which she completed in 2000. An exhibition of her recent work Place (Village) (2006-2008) is currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Whiteread lives and works in London.

A fully illustrated catalogue with an accompanying essay by James Lawrence will be available.

For further information, please contact the gallery.

For more information, please contact Michelle Pobar at 310.271.9400 or mpobar@gagosian.com.]]> Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:28:43 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-06_rachel-whiteread/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/445847301/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-08_richard-prince/
November 8 - December 20, 2008
24th Street Gallery

Opening reception for the artist: Saturday, November 8th, from 6 to 8pm


"The story was basically about a guy who lands in St Barth, gets off the plane, is immediately told that there's been a nuclear holocaust in the rest of the world, and he looks at his family and says 'We can't go back.'"
--Richard Prince

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce "Canal Zone," an exhibition of new paintings by Richard Prince.

Following his burlesque dialogues with the art of De Kooning, Picasso, and Naughty Nurse pulp fiction, Prince has turned to his own biographical roots for inspiration. The Panama Canal Zone, where he was born, was, until 1979, a political exclave of the U.S., part-colonial company enclave and part-socialist government, purportedly dominated by virulent separatist racism. In his characteristic manner, Prince has transformed the former reality of his birthplace into a fictive space: "Canal Zone" provides an anarchic tropical scenario in which extreme emanations of the (white American male) id – fleshy female pin-ups, Rastafarians with massive dreadlocks, electric guitars, and virile black bodies – run riot.

Aside from their "storyboard" looks and their ability to absorb information based on Prince's original "pitch," what is evidently new in these paintings is the way they are, literally, "put together," like provisional magazine lay-outs. Some images, scanned from originals, are printed directly onto the base canvas; others are "dragged on," using a primitive collage technique whereby printed figures are roughly cut out, then the backs of those figures painted and pasted directly onto the base canvas with a squeegee so that the excess paint squirts out on and around the image. On top of this are violently suggestive swipes and drips of livid paint and scribbles of oil-stick crayon which, together with the comic, abstract sign-features that mask each figure's face, add to the powerful push-pull between degree and effect. This has become a completely new way for Prince to make a painting, where much of what shows up on the surface is incidental to the process.

Thomas More's Utopia of 1518 described a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean that possessed a seemingly perfect socio-political-legal system. Since then, the term has been used both for intentional communities attempting to create ideal societies and ideals that are impossible to achieve. Prince's island and its unfettered imaginings that vacillate between humorous delinquency and Sadeian excess, is a rather more carnivalesque response to the original concept. "Canal Zone," this orgiastic, post-nuclear, new order for civilization as we once knew it, takes its place among other great modern visions of the apocalypse, from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Pablo Picasso's Guernica, to The Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and Michel Houllebecq's prophetic Platform.

Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and lives and works in upstate New York. His work has been the subject of major exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Serpentine Gallery, London (2008). A retrospective survey opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2007 and traveled to The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 2008.

For more information, please contact Melissa Passman at 212.741.1111 or mpassman@gagosian.com.]]> Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:03:24 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-08_richard-prince/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/443640576/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-06_hiroshi-sugimoto/
November 6 - December 20, 2008
21st Street Gallery

Opening reception for the artist: Thursday, November 6th, from 6 to 8pm


Naming things has something to do with human awareness, with the separation of the entire world from you. So with the Seascapes, I was thinking about the most ancient of human impressions. The time when man first named the world around him…
--Hiroshi Sugimoto

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce "7 Days / 7 Nights," an exhibition of fourteen photographs from the Seascapes series by Hiroshi Sugimoto in an architectural setting of his own design.

For more than thirty years, Sugimoto has produced series of highly refined black and white photographs. His subjects, which include movie theaters and drive-ins, natural history dioramas, waxworks, and seascapes, provoke fundamental questions about the relationship of photography and time while exploring the mysterious and ineffable nature of reality.

In 1980 he began working on an ongoing series of photographs of the sea and its horizon in locations all over the world, using an old-fashioned large-format camera to make exposures of varying duration. These seascapes are as much about the nature of photography as nature itself. They fall into several basic types: clear dayscapes with crisp, absolute horizons dividing bright, blank skies from dark water; foggy dayscapes where sky and sea merge atmospherically; nightscapes, in which sky, water, waves, and horizon register as so many degrees of black; and dawnscapes shot deliberately out of focus, where sunpaths spill from misty horizons, rendering the candor of photographic vision as pure impressionism. Captions are nuggets of empirical information and the nomenclature in Sugimoto's titles resonates: strait, gulf, bay, ocean, sea, channel, lake; Atami, Santa Cesarea, Pilion, Sounion, Tearai, Weston Cliff, Eagle River.

By returning to the same subject repeatedly, he reveals the subtleties that he finds in the primordial sea, site of the origin and emergence of life as well as of eternal continuity. While the Seascapes invoke proof of human existence within the vast and autonomous evolution of the universe, the title that Sugimoto has given to this particular grouping draws a clear analogy between the story of creation and the artistic act.

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. In 1970 he moved to Los Angeles and studied photography at the Art Center College of Design. He has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1995); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2000); the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2002); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2003) and the Fondation Cartier de l'art contemporain, Paris (2004). A major survey of his work opened at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo in 2005 and traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. and the Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas (2006), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf 2007, and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2008). Sugimoto lives and works in New York City and Tokyo.

Please contact Melissa Passman at mpassman@gagosian.com or 212.741.1111 for further information.]]> Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:46:05 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-06_hiroshi-sugimoto/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/439228404/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-04_isabel-and-other-intimate-strangers/
November 4 - December 13, 2008
Madison Avenue Gallery

"To make a head really lifelike is impossible, and the more you struggle to make it lifelike the less like life it becomes."
--Alberto Giacometti

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce "Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon." This exhibition brings together important loans and rarely seen works from international museums and private collections, including the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, The Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Nasher Collection, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Sainsbury Collection. It explores the enduring fascination of Giacometti and Bacon with the existential challenges and ineffable mysteries of the human figure and psyche, explored throughout their careers in the portraits, or likenesses, that they produced of close friends and family.

One such subject was the model and muse Isabel Rawsthorne, a compelling figure of consuming vitality and recklessness. While Rawsthorne generally made an instant and overwhelming physical impression on people, over time her effect on Giacometti produced profound conflictual responses in him. Beyond the clearly identified bronze busts of her such as Tete d'Isabel I and II (1936 and 1937-38 respectively), his female standing figures, from Femme qui marche (1932-36) to the diminutive pedestal sculptures and the Amazonian Grandes Figures, are said to have been inspired by his vision of her standing some distance away from him on a street one night, distant and imperious. Isabel's relationship with Francis Bacon was quite different, that of kindred spirit and drinking companion rather than muse, yet her distinctive presence is one that haunts his work, like Giacometti before him. One of Bacon's finest pictures, Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967), is based on a fleeting memory of her, while in the high-keyed, viscerally rendered triptychs Three Studies for a head of Isabel Rawsthorne (1965 and 1965), Bacon's perennial struggle with experience and its depiction plays itself out in what he described as "shifting sequences where one picture reflects on the other continuously."

Giacometti's most enduring and remarkable relationship was with his younger brother Diego, the subject of his first sculpture, Testa di Diego, completed when he was just thirteen years old. Companion, consultant, and studio assistant, Diego became his brother's favorite model and male archetype. Giacometti's wife Annette, the subject of hundreds of paintings and sculptures, and his professional model and mistress Caroline would become similarly pervasive referents, inspiring more subjective variations on the feminine form, from the tiny yet shapely bronze Figurines (c. 1954-56) and seated sculptures (Femme Assise, 1956) to paintings such as Annette (1952) and Caroline dans sa robe rouge, 1965.

During the 1960s, Bacon, who had made very few named portraits in the first half of his career, concentrated increasingly on himself and a handful of close friends as his subjects -- from his boyfriend, George Dyer, to Lucian Freud, Muriel Belcher (who ran The Colony Room, Bacon's favorite drinking club), and Henrietta Moraes. Bacon said that he thought of friendship as "two people pulling each other to bits" and, in his unsettling portraits, he vivisected his friends in no uncertain manner.

"Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers" will be accompanied by a full color publication with essays by Véronique Wiesinger, director of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris who is also responsible for the catalogue raisonné of Alberto Giacometti; and Martin Harrison, director of the project for the catalogue raisonné of the work of Francis Bacon. The Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti has overseen the selection of Giacometti works for this exhibition.

The exhibition inaugurates Gagosian's fourth floor galleries at 980 Madison Avenue. It also coincides with the first major survey of Alberto Giacometti's work in Russia, opening at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow on September 16, and Tate Britain's historic exhibition marking Francis Bacon's centenary (September 8, 2008 – January 4, 2009).

For further information, please contact Melissa Passman at mpassman@gagosian.com or 212.741.1111.]]> Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:16:12 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-04_isabel-and-other-intimate-strangers/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/445919376/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-27_dan-colen/
November 27 - December 17, 2008
Davies Street Gallery

]]> Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:27:42 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-27_dan-colen/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/452403211/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-12-18_dan-colen/ Davies Street Gallery

]]> Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:28:07 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-12-18_dan-colen/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/449889526/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-21_lawrence-weiner/
November 21, 2008 - January 17, 2009
Rome Gallery

Opening reception for the artist: Friday, November 21st, 6 to 8 pm


1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK
2. THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED
3. THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT

Art is something human beings make to present to others to understand their place in the world.
--Lawrence Weiner

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Lawrence Weiner. This will be Weiner's first solo exhibition in Rome in more than ten years and his first with the gallery.

A pioneering Conceptual artist of the 1960s, Weiner was among the first to dematerialize the object of art into pure language. Using elegant yet utilitarian typefaces and striking monochromes, either stenciled, painted, printed, or mounted in relief, he composes sculptural propositions as texts that describe process, material, and relations. By translating his studio work into words, Weiner communicates the content of each work without specifying any of its physical qualities, thus rendering the work objective, accessible, and useful for a diverse audience. Dedicated to the circulation of ideas and meaning, a single statement can be endlessly adapted into a myriad of forms, from paint to stone to song lyrics.

In Rome, Weiner has developed a site-specific installation for the oval gallery comprising two large-scale wall-drawings, a suite of seven drawings on paper, and one mixed-media work on paper. The content of the exhibition refers to Rome's past and present, from the legend of the seven hills to the enduring popular tradition of throwing a coin into the Fontana di Trevi to make a wish. Weiner works primarily in English, but here includes Latin phrases that have become part of common vernacular, like the title of the show, which literally translates as "something for something", indicating a more or less equivalent exchange of goods or services for value.

Lawrence Weiner was born in the Bronx, NY in 1942. In addition to his early experimental work in film and video, Weiner has produced artist books and ephemera, as well as large-scale public commissions in cities including Vancouver, Vienna, Eindhoven, and New York. Recent major exhibitions include Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2000), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, (2004) and Tate Gallery, London (2006). In 2007 the Whitney Museum of American Art in collaboration with MOCA, Los Angeles, mounted the first major retrospective of Weiner's work in the United States. This exhibition is on view at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf through January 2009. Weiner divides his time between New York City and Amsterdam.

A fully illustrated catalog with an essay by Kira van Lil will accompany the exhibition.

For further information please contact Francesca Martinotti at +39 0 697 848 570 or martinotti@lagenziarisorse.it.

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Inagurazione alla presenza dell'artista: 21 Novembre, dalle 18 alle 20

1. L'ARTISTA PUO' CONCEPIRE L'OPERA
2. L'OPERA PUO' ESSER FABBRICATA
3. L'OPERA NON HA BISOGNO DI ESSER COSTRUITA

"L'arte è qualcosa che l'uomo fa da offrire agli altri per fargli comprendere il loro posto nel mondo."
--Lawrence Weiner

Gagosian Gallery è lieta di presentare una mostra di Lawrence Weiner, la prima mostra monografica dell'artista a Roma in oltre dieci anni e la prima con la galleria.

Pioneristico artista concettuale degli anni '60, Weiner è stato tra i primi a smaterializzare l'oggetto artistico in puro linguaggio. Attraverso caratteri di stampa eleganti ma funzionali e con monocromi d'effetto, siano essi stencil, dipinti, stampati o installati a rilievo, l'artista compone proposizioni scultoree in testi che descrivono processi, materia, relazioni. Traducendo il processo artistico in parole, Weiner comunica il senso di ogni opera senza definire nessuna delle sue qualità fisiche, rendendo così l'opera universalmente oggettiva, accessibile, fruibile per lo spettatore. Rivolta alla circolazione di idee e significati, una singola affermazione può essere illimitatamente adattata ad una miriade di forme, dalla pittura alla pietra fino al testo di una canzone.

A Roma Weiner sviluppa un'installazione site specific per lo spazio ovale della galleria che comprende due installazioni murali di grande formato, una serie di sette disegni su carta ed un'opera a tecnica mista, anch'essa su carta. Il progetto si ispira alla storia mitologica di Roma, passata e presente, con riferimenti ai sette colli su cui e' stata costruita la citta' ed alla famosa tradizione romana di esprimere un desiderio lanciando una moneta nella Fontana di Trevi. Weiner utilizza prevalentemente la lingua inglese, ma qui include frasi latine divenute parte di un gergo condiviso, come il titolo della mostra "Quid pro quo" che indica uno scambio più o meno equo di beni o servizi.

Lawrence Weiner è nato nel Bronx nel 1942 . Oltre ai primi film e video sperimentali, Weiner ha realizzato libri d'artista ed opere effimere durata, nonchè numerosi progetti su larga scala di arte pubblica per le città di Vancouver, Vienna, Eindhoven, New York. Tra le importanti mostre recentemente realizzate si contano quelle del Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlino (2000), del Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Città del Messico (2004), della Tate Gallery, Londra (2006). Nel 2007 il Whitney Museum, in collaborazione con il MOCA di Los Angeles, ha organizzato la prima grande retrospettiva del lavoro di Weiner attualmente in mostra al K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfahlen Museum, Dusseldorf, fino a gennaio 2009. L'artista vive e lavora tra New York ed Amsterdam.

La mostra sara' accompagnata da un catalogo con un saggio di Kira van Lil.

Ufficio stampa:

Francesca Martinotti
+39 0 697 848 570
martinotti@lagenziarisorse.it]]> Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:17:37 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-11-21_lawrence-weiner/