Public Installation
Douglas Gordon
if when why what
December 8–31, 2022, 8:22pm daily
Piccadilly Lights, London
circa.art
Beginning Thursday, December 8, Douglas Gordon will take over the Piccadilly Lights advertising screen in London’s Piccadilly Circus, as well as a global network of screens in cities including Berlin, Melbourne, Milan, New York, and Seoul, nightly for three minutes at 20:22 (8:22pm) local time throughout December, with his new film, if when why what (2018–22). The never-before-seen work examines the history of the surrounding area, in particular Soho’s relationship with the erotic entertainment industry, focusing on the neighborhood’s iconic neon signage. The project is presented by the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (CIRCA) in conjunction with the exhibition Douglas Gordon: Neon Ark at Gagosian, Davies Street, London, and will also be viewable online on the CIRCA website.
Share
Rendering of Douglas Gordon’s if when why what (2018–22) on Piccadilly Lights, London
Related News
Screening
Douglas Gordon
Film as Raw Material
February 22–March 14, 2024, 6pm on Thursdays
Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London
Join Gagosian for a series of film screenings inside Douglas Gordon’s exhibition All I need is a little bit of everything at the gallery’s Grosvenor Hill location. The show centrally features Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now... (1999–), an ever-growing installation displayed on more than a hundred screens, ranging from traditional TVs to iPads, that brings together nearly all of the artist’s video work from the past three decades. The four films selected for screening have been employed as raw materials in some of Gordon’s most important works and figure prominently in the encyclopedic installation.
Douglas Gordon, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now... (1999–), installation view, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, 2024. Photo: Lucy Dawkins
Commission
Douglas Gordon
Undergroundoverheard
Douglas Gordon’s undergroundoverheard (2023) will be unveiled at the new Dean Street entrance of the Tottenham Court Road station on February 1, 2024, as part of the Transport for London (TfL) Elizabeth Line, which opened for service in 2022. Installed on a large digital screen on the main wall of the new ticket hall, the video installation builds on Gordon’s text-based artworks that use short statements to make the reader speculate; for the first time, these have been translated into several of the most widely used languages in London, reflecting and celebrating the diversity of the surrounding Soho neighborhood. At seven stations on the Elizabeth Line, the Crossrail Art Programme commissioned public artworks that have been designed to interact both physically and conceptually with their sites.
Douglas Gordon, undergroundoverheard, 2023 (still) © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany 2024
Partnership
Douglas Gordon and
Institut Giacometti
The exhibition Douglas Gordon: The Morning After was scheduled to open at the Giacometti Institute in Paris on April 24, 2020, placing original works by Gordon side by side with those of Alberto Giacometti. Unfortunately, owing to the covid-19 crisis, the exhibition had to be delayed for a year. As a result, the institution has invited Douglas Gordon to collaborate on several activities from April 2020 through April 2021. This unprecedented partnership, the institute’s first with a contemporary artist, will variously take the form of impromptu interventions, disseminations, exchanges, and meetings on the foundation’s website and in the spaces of the institute and its partners.
Douglas Gordon’s hand alongside a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti at Institut Giacometti, Paris. Artwork © Succession Giacometti. Photo: Thomas Gangnet
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2024
The Summer 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail of Roy Lichtenstein’s Bauhaus Stairway Mural (1989) on the cover.
Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday Painter
Curated by Francesco Bonami, Sunday is the first solo presentation of new work by Maurizio Cattelan in New York in over twenty years. Here, Bonami asks us to consider Cattelan as a political artist, detailing the potent and clear observations at the core of these works.
Frank Stella
In celebration of the life and work of Frank Stella, the Quarterly shares the artist’s last interview from our Summer 2024 issue. Stella spoke with art historian Megan Kincaid about friendship, formalism, and physicality.
Highlights: Salone del Mobile Milano 2024
This year’s Salone del Mobile Milano brought together a range of installations, debuts, and collaborations from across the worlds of design, fashion, and architecture. We present a selection of these projects.
Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day
Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio on Long Island, New York, as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.
Richard Armstrong
Richard Armstrong, director emeritus of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, joins the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald to discuss his election to the board of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, as well as the changing priorities and strategies facing museums, foundations, and curators. He reflects on his various roles within museums and recounts his first meeting with Frankenthaler.
Touch of Evil
Andrew Russeth situates Jamian Juliano-Villani’s daring paintings within her myriad activities shaking up the art world.
Vladimir Kagan’s First Collection: An Interview with Chris Eitel
Chris Eitel, Vladimir Kagan’s protégé and the current director of design and production at Vladimir Kagan Design Group, invited the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to the brand’s studio in New Jersey, where the two discussed the forthcoming release of the First Collection. The series, now available through holly hunt, reintroduces the first chair and table that Kagan ever designed—part of Eitel’s efforts to honor the furniture avant-gardist’s legacy while carrying the company into the future.
Institutional Buzz
On the occasion of Andrea Fraser ’sexhibition at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano, Italy, Mike Stinavage speaks with the feminist performance artist about institutions and their discontents.
Simon Hantaï: Azzurro
Join curator Anne Baldassari as she discusses the exhibition Simon Hantaï:Azzurro, Gagosian, Rome, and the significance of blue in the artist’s practice. The show forms part of a triptych with Gagosian’s two previous Hantaï exhibitions, LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR at Le Bourget in 2019–20, and Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc in New York, in 2022.
Game Changer: Alexey Brodovitch
Gerry Badger reflects on the persistent influence of the graphic designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitch, the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
Outsider Artist
David Frankel considers the life and work of Jeff Perrone, an artist who rejected every standard of success, and reflects on what defines an existence devoted to art.