All posts tagged: Gagosian

Unrealized Work by Christo & Jeanne-Claude Will Take Over Gagosian

Unrealized Work by Christo & Jeanne-Claude Will Take Over Gagosian

Published by Jenni Sidey

Gagosian gallery in London will present an artwork conceived by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1968 but never realized before the artists’ deaths—Jeanne-Claude in 2009 and Christo in 2020. The exhibition “Christo: Air,” opening May 21 and running through August 21, will feature rare works by Christo as well as Air Package on a Ceiling, a work that Christo and Jeanne-Claude planned for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia but never mounted due to technical limitations. Described in the gallery’s press release for the exhibition as a “vast, internally illuminated and suspended form,” the work will measure around 32 by 52 feet and hangs just over the heads of viewers in the gallery. Related Articles In a story about the show in the Guardian, Lorenza Giovanelli, who started working as Christo’s studio manager in 2017, said, “It will look like a beautiful cloud, lit from within, hanging from the ceiling of the gallery space … It will be very magical … I’ve imagined this many times. So I am really impatient to see it.” She …

Gagosian Opens New Flagship Gallery at 980 Madison Avenue

Gagosian Opens New Flagship Gallery at 980 Madison Avenue

Published by José Betancourt

This weekend Gagosian is opening a new flagship at 980 Madison Avenue’s ground floor with shows by Marcel Duchamp and early works by Robert Rauschenberg. The new space, designed by Caplan Colaku Architects (CCA), moves the gallery from its former upper-floor perch in the same building to street level, consolidating three former storefronts into a continuous, two-level layout totaling more than 12,000 square feet. Floor-to-ceiling steel doors align with the facade, creating what feels like a gradual transition from the bustle of Madison Avenue into the gallery’s more quiet interior. Related Articles For CCA founder Jonathan Caplan, the project was less about expansion than control. The architecture was tightly calibrated with some dimensions adjusted only by inches and the materials kept deliberately restrained. The result is what he describes as a kind of “tonal discipline.” Portland Taupe stone runs continuously across floors, paired with plaster walls and brushed stainless steel. A central reception area divides public-facing galleries from more intimate viewing rooms, while two staircases lead to more compressed spaces below. The effect is quiet …

Larry Gagosian Talks Duchamp, Sushi—and Gives a First Look at the Top Secret New Gagosian Gallery in New York

Larry Gagosian Talks Duchamp, Sushi—and Gives a First Look at the Top Secret New Gagosian Gallery in New York

Published by Sam Flores

Gagosian could have gone with a splashy primary market show, featuring wet paint from one of his hottest living artists. Instead for the inaugural outing, the gallery is showcasing the big bang of conceptual art—to honor his spiritual 980 neighbor, he’s doing a Duchamp show. The timing could not be better, as earlier this month a mind-bending survey of Duchamp’s masterworks opened at the Museum of Modern Art, a short walk away in Midtown. (“When I was planning the show, I didn’t realize MoMA was gonna do this big retrospective, this massive show, but that seemed fortuitous,” Gagosian told me.) The MoMA show has been reaping praise—it’s a revelation—but the most striking thing for me is how fresh it looks, how shocking Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 remains in person, how poetically Cagean it is to see a glass bottle full of Paris air or a snow shovel hanging from the ceiling, and how maddening it is to see the Mona Lisa with a mustache. “That’s a strange sensation, that you’re seeing these works—works …

Theaster Gates Gifts David Drake Vessel to Descendants

Theaster Gates Gifts David Drake Vessel to Descendants

Published by José Betancourt

“It started out as young scholarly curiosity,” the artist Theaster Gates said of his initial interest in the work of the 19th-century enslaved potter David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter. Gates was an undergraduate at Iowa State University in the early ’90s, making ceramics that he said referenced “white Americana craft” from the ’60s, like Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio. While he admired that work, Gates recalled talking to his professor, Ingrid Lilligren, about the lineage in which he was working, asking, “Are the only named people we know all white guys?” He felt that “there was no precedent for the kind of craft I’m interested in making.” Related Articles But Lilligren pointed him to the school library which held a small catalog discussing Dave the Potter, whose work was just beginning to be recognized more widely. “Dave was a kind of archetype of a Black poet-potter, as a way of developing an apparatus for believing more in myself. I believed more in Dave first: look at him, then look at me,” he …

Gagosian to Open New Upper East Side Gallery with a Duchamp Show

Gagosian to Open New Upper East Side Gallery with a Duchamp Show

Published by Jenni Sidey

Having been kicked out of its longtime home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Gagosian is starting over in the neighborhood with a new space on the ground floor of 980 Madison Avenue, the same building where it formerly had a multilevel gallery. Because Gagosian is such a force within the art industry, the inauguration of the new Upper East Side gallery will be closely watched by market observers. But the show being staged there, opening on April 25, is also an event for more art historically minded types. Related Articles Inaugurating the space is an exhibition for Marcel Duchamp, whose art rarely appears in commercial settings. Running in tandem with the Museum of Modern Art’s recently opened retrospective, the show is being held in the same place where Duchamp had a New York exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in 1965, when the artist’s reputation was not quite what it is today. “It all started with Duchamp,” dealer Larry Gagosian said in a statement, adding, “I couldn’t imagine a better artist or a more critical body of …

Politicians Trade Barbs Over ‘Guernica’ Loan Request

Politicians Trade Barbs Over ‘Guernica’ Loan Request

Published by José Betancourt

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. The Headlines FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLÉDOS. Spanish leaders are trading insults in a heated, increasingly political clash over the Basque regional government’s recent request to borrow Pablo Picasso’s Guernica for an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, reports El Pais. “It makes no sense for everything to be returned to its origin,” said the president of the Madrid governing body, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. “It represents a provincial mindset when culture is universal.” To this, Basque Nationalist Party leader Aitor Esteban accused Ayuso of being the “provincial” one for viewing “having a beer on a terrace as a national statement.” Two weeks ago, Basque regional president Imanol Pradales formally requested that the painting be loaned to the Bilbao museum to mark the city’s 90th anniversary, but Picasso’s black-and-white masterpiece has not left Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía since 1992, and the museum has repeatedly taken steps to keep it that way. Today, Spain’s culture minister is expected to make a public announcement about the transfer request. IN MEMORIAM. Thomas Zipp, the …

Larry Gagosian Recalls Misstep With Early Gallery: ‘Nobody Showed Up’

Larry Gagosian Recalls Misstep With Early Gallery: ‘Nobody Showed Up’

Published by Jenni Sidey

Larry Gagosian doesn’t do a lot of interviews, but one supposes when Elle Decor asks to do a glossy profile on the rocket-ship trajectory of his eponymous gallery, you say yes. Speaking on the occasion of a new gallery opening at 980 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side this spring, Gagosian reflected on his many successes—and two notable failures. His short-lived San Francisco gallery, which opened in 2016 near SFMoMA and closed in 2021, was one such failure. At the time, a spokesperson framed the closing as an effort to “consolidate and strengthen Gagosian’s presence in California.” In the interview with Elle Decor, the mega-dealer was quite a bit blunter. Related Articles “It just failed,” Gagosian said. “I mean, nobody showed up. It was so depressing. I’d fly up there for an opening, and there’s nobody there. I’d go, What the f— am I doing here?” While the Bay Area is home to many ARTnews Top 200 collectors, including Laurene Powell Jobs, billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreesen and Laura Arillaga-Andreesen, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, former Gap Inc. chairman Robert Fisher, and …

Sotheby’s and Gagosian Veteran Publishes History of Art Market

Sotheby’s and Gagosian Veteran Publishes History of Art Market

Published by Jenni Sidey

When Valentina Castellani was invited to teach a class at New York University on the history of the art market from the Renaissance to today, she came up against one obstacle in her preparation of the syllabus, even despite her expertise in the matter, with longtime art market experience at both Sotheby’s and Gagosian. “I couldn’t find a book that actually covered all this span,” she said in a phone interview. “There are excellent books and academic studies on many of these periods, but I couldn’t find one that gave the whole panorama.”  Related Articles Aiming to fill that gap is her forthcoming book Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery, to be published by Gagosian itself. (The book was complete by the time Gagosian made the offer, Castellani said, and the gallery and the dealer had no input on its contents. According to Castellani, the book hardly mentions the gallery’s famed founder, Larry Gagosian.)  Featured on the cover is a new artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, and inside is an introduction …

How Larry Gagosian Owns Oscar Thursday in LA

How Larry Gagosian Owns Oscar Thursday in LA

Published by Sam Flores

The days before the Oscars are a particularly heady time to be in Los Angeles. The movies have their biggest bash of the year in the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, one of the world’s great mix-and-match events, with guests from art, tech, fashion, music, and media—a room charged with the electricity of different industries mingling. For its own Oscar spectacle, though, Hollywood’s art scene has the Gagosian Oscar opening. Last night, as the opening peaked, there was a whole host of fellow Los Angeles artists there to support, including Mungo Thomson and Sayre Gomez, huddled on the top floor near a masterful studio painting. LACMA director Michael Govan was there, as was Whitney director Scott Rothkopf. Local collectors, too: Benedikt and Lauren Taschen, who walked in with the artist Albert Oehlen, near where Laurent Asscher was huddled with David Zwirner director Alex Marshall, near where Nicolas Berggruen was with Alex Israel. The exhibition itself was a showstopper. The tennis courts, when seen in full, add a conceptual dimension to Wood’s intricately conjured landscapes. At one …

Jonas Wood Debuts New Tennis Court Paintings in Los Angeles

Jonas Wood Debuts New Tennis Court Paintings in Los Angeles

Published by José Betancourt

Jonas Wood has been watching sports his whole life, and the habit has followed him into the studio. “I played tons of sports when I was a kid and I was obsessed with following them,” Wood said, speaking with me by Zoom from his Los Angeles studio. “I used to read the entire sports section in the Boston Globe, all the stats and everything.”  When he got out of grad school, Wood wanted to practice portraiture, but was “kind of exhausted trying to find personal subjects—friends, family, myself.” So he started using sports cards and images of basketball and baseball players he grew up with. It was just a way to practice painting the figure. Related Articles Tennis arrived more casually—almost by accident—while Wood was watching matches late at night in the studio. “I remember watching the Australian Open and taking pictures of the TV with my phone,” he told me, occasionally looking off camera to dip his brush in paint. “The lights were off in the studio and the court was just this solid color …