‘It was absolutely intentional,’ says Tyler Mitchell, clarifying his decision to show works from ‘Portrait of the Modern Dandy’ at Gagosian’s Burlington Arcade gallery. Indeed, Britain’s first department store, as it was initially intended, separates, by a few roads either side, the sartorial landmarks of Savile Row and Jermyn Street; just a short walk away is a statue of Beau Brummell. ‘The arcade itself was built as a kind of promenade for leisure and display,’ the American photographer continues, ‘which echoes the very values of dandyism. Figures like Olaudah Equiano and Julius Soubise were already moving through these streets centuries ago, using style to claim freedom, to self-fashion, and to push against social hierarchies.’

The photographs were originally conceived as part of a visual essay for the catalogue of the Met’s spring 2025 Costume Institute exhibition, ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ – curated by Monica L Miller, the show was primarily informed by her 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. That they are being exhibited publicly for the first time in London, in an area charged with style-coded history, is particularly satisfying for Mitchell. ‘It’s about deliberately placing contemporary images of Black Dandy presence back into a lineage that, in many ways, began in England,’ he concurs.

Tyler Mitchell ‘Portrait of the Modern Dandy’ at Gagosian Burlington Arcade

Placing them here asks us to both review our understanding of dandy aesthetics and the context in which they exist, and in many ways tethers the images to other recent surveys of menswear and Black style in the city – thinking about Ekow Eshun’s ‘Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity’ for example, which opened at The Photographers’ Gallery in 2016, and the V&A’s 2022 exhibition, ‘Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear’. More streamlined by its very essence, Mitchell’s series is shaped by his own interpretation of the dandy and the intersection of style, race, society and culture.

‘I was definitely sensitive to dandyism before the project commenced,’ the photographer says. ‘I hadn't yet read Monica's book, but I understood the Black Dandy to be an archetype of masculinity that cleverly twisted conventions of male dress on its head. I always liked that idea, as growing up in Atlanta, I was always looking for alternative ways to express the way I felt in touch with my own male identity, which of course was intertwined with my Blackness.’

Widely celebrated for his world-building and considered scenes of a Black utopia that prioritises leisure as a tender pursuit – ideas showcased in his second monograph, Wish This Was Real, published by Aperture in tandem with the Burlington Arcade show – Mitchell typically uses fashion as a tool for storytelling. Moreover, his close collaborators include the designers Jonathan Anderson and Grace Wales Bonner (at the Met Gala in May, he wore a bespoke Wales Bonner look inspired by Larry Neal’s 1974 collection of poems, Hoodoo Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts), while his 2018 American Vogue shoot with Beyoncé, lauded for its history-making (aged 23, he became the first Black photographer to shoot the magazine’s cover in its then 126-year history), was additionally notable for its presence in the September issue: a bona fide heavyweight in fashion media’s calendar.

In the Gagosian show, his protagonists are smartly dressed in varying suit styles and accessories; some wear looks from the Met exhibition, others are self-styled in vintage or wear pieces from their own wardrobe. In one image, The Dinner Party, a group of nine sit around a subtly dressed table, their sharp black suits adorned with top hats and bow ties; in Harlem Stoop, a cast of eight gather outside a Brownstone in a nod to the Harlem Renaissance – one gentleman wears a heavy tweed coat over a matching suit, another ties a jumper over his shoulders.

‘Monica understood from the outset that this Costume Institute project was unique: photography of Black dandies has often been the source material for how we understand dandyism,’ says Mitchell, reflecting on the project’s backstory. ‘She gave me a lot of room to play, but we were aligned in wanting to balance historical reference with a distinctly modern sensibility, while also imagining the future.’ Research meant immersing himself in her writing and revisiting other books and films, such as Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston.

‘One moment that really stuck with me was finding an early portrait of Colman Domingo in Shantrelle P Lewis’s Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style,’ he recalls. ‘It reminded me how layered and unexpected these histories can be: dandyism can be evoked through almost anything, as long as the attitude and wit are there.’

‘I approach all my work thinking of the pictures as fragments of a larger story, or even a film,’ he continues, speaking to the framework of his broader practice. ‘The work leans into beauty, but it also accepts that not every image has to be a singular masterpiece. There's meant to be fluidity.’ With ‘Portrait of the Modern Dandy’, he viewed the image-making as operating in dialogue with other photographers, entering a conversation with predecessors like James Van Der Zee, Carl Van Vechten, Seydou Keïta, and Malick Sidibé, he says. In London, he references contemporary figures Yinka Shonibare, Isaac Julien, Grace Wales Bonner, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

‘For me, the Black Dandy is a beacon of possibility, a way of imagining what else masculinity could look like.’

‘Portrait of The Modern Dandy’ is on view at Gagosian, Burlington Arcade, London until 3 October 2025. ‘Tyler Mitchell: Wish This Was Real’ opens at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, on 15 October 2025.

The American photographer Roe Ethridge isn’t precious about titles. For his latest exhibitions with Gagosian, recently opened in Gstaad and London (through 8 and 28 September, respectively), he made an inventory of various labels. ‘I made a list of the most prominent themes of selected images,’ he clarifies, recounting over email how he arrived at the moniker for this new pair of shows, ‘Happy Birthday Louise Parker II’. ‘First was “Louise Parker”, then “Birthday” came in at second or third, and immediately the phrase “Happy Birthday Louise Parker” came to mind. I had always imagined the portrait of her sitting in the red chair [Louise in a Chair for Double (2015)] as a picture of her at her imaginary birthday party.’

Parker, whose image is the central though not sole motif of the two shows – described by the gallery as ‘a pair of different but interconnected selections’ – has been a part of Ethridge’s orbit since the early 2010s, when she was streetcast for an editorial he was shooting. ‘She was a student of Stephen Shore at Bard college and was already aware of what I was up to as a photographer,’ he shares. ‘We never talked about it much, the collaboration has always been pretty effortless. She’s actually coming to Gstaad on 22 August, which coincides with the big Polo match [The Hublot Polo Gold Cup] in the city. We are hoping to make a picture of her with the Polo match in the background!’

Adapted from a previous show in Milan (‘Happy Birthday Louise Parker’), which opened the gallery at 10 Corso Cosmo in February 2024 and was curated by Alessandro Rabottini, the displays in Gstaad and London are typical of the photographer’s fugue approach to curating and image-making more broadly, a defining characteristic of his decades-long career, in which his work has comfortably straddled in tandem the arenas of the commercial and the personal. ‘I love the idea of the fugue as a sort of musical guide to the sequencing,’ he notes. ‘It’s like a multitude of little dialectal moments that create third things and hopefully those third things turn into chords or passages.’

In addition to those of Parker, in Gstaad and London there are portraits of friends and family members and still lifes made for brands and publications.

‘Alessandro was instrumental in the concept of the [10 Corso Como] show,’ says Ethridge, recalling the formation of the Milan installation, ‘weaving in the personal and commercial images with Louise as an iconic refrain. He and I have known each other for years. We worked together on every aspect of the show, and I think it’s a testament to working with a great curator that the show was generous in what it delivered and how it worked in the context of Corso Cosmo.’

This interest in collaboration stretches beyond his work with Parker and Rabottini, and elements of ‘Happy Birthday Louise Parker II’ were similarly shaped by his friends, suggests Ethridge. Take Louise on David’s Refrigerator (2012-20), an image of a worn print affixed at the corners with magnets: ‘My friend David Jimenez, who produced the images of Louise on Brass with me, had that invite poster of Louise on his refrigerator for ten years or so and sent me that image,’ offers the photographer. ‘I loved it so much I just enlarged the file he sent. It feels natural to me to have themes or subjects return over time, it’s something photography is particularly suited for.’

Indeed, this backstory recalls Refrigerator, 1999, a photograph of his mother’s busy fridge front originally made on assignment. It subsequently opened his 2022 monograph American Polychronic, and Ethridge has since described it as a self-portrait.

‘I love the new still life image in the Davies Street show [in London], it depicts a sort of waspy poolside scene with a Loro Piana handbag,’ he continues, highlighting Loro Piana Bag for Vanity Fair, 2024, a vivid poolside scene featuring, alongside the Italian leather and wicker bag, a beachball, cube of ice and a large shell.

‘The set and props were handled by Andy Harmon, who was also the set and prop guy for the Comme des Garçons still life and the duck for Burberry (he and I have had a long collaboration). It wasn’t until I made the big print that I realised the engraving on the little gold lock of the bag has the letters “LP”. Same as the initials of Louise Parker!’

'Happy Birthday Louise Parker II' is at Gagosian in Gstaad and London, through 8 and 28 September, respectively.

gagosian.com

Richard Prince’s subversion of mainstream motifs explored hidden facets in an all-American identity. Turning his lens to an eclectic range of subjects, from cowboys as a homogeneous idealisation of the Wild West, to his photographs of luxury watches and pens, Prince was above all interested in the sociological slant photography imbued on a subject. 

‘Richard Prince: Early Photography, 1977–87’

Now, the beginnings of Prince’s career are explored in an exhibition at the Gagosian London’s Grosvenor Hill and Davies Street galleries, marking the beginning of Frieze London 2023, as the art fair celebrates 20 years. Taking the years 1977 – 1987 as a focus, more than 80 photographs unite work from Prince’s productive decade.

The Entertainers series (1982-3) is explored in the Davies Street Gallery; recasting the glamour of fame, Prince strips the subjects back to a grid-like uniformity. In Grosvenor Hill, photographs from different series are united, from his self-portraits to a dissecting of accepted masculinity motifs.  

As a symbol of idealised heroism, cowboys fascinated Prince. In Untitled (Cowboy) (1980–84), the cowboy is almost interchangeable with the landscape. The photographer continues to play with perceptions in his black and white Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1980); photographed in a suit, tie, eye make-up and lipstick, he expresses an alienation also seen in Untitled (Couple) (1977) and Untitled (Man Looking to the Left) (1978), where rephotographed images of models dressed in suits became a symbol of representation themselves. Also recontextualised are his photographed advertisements for luxury goods, once again setting Prince apart, this time from the photographers who took the original images.

Images take a sideways look at stock photography, something the subjects of Criminals and Celebrities (1986) try to escape, while Untitled (Fainted) (1980) considers the stills of unconscious women in a questioning of the realist narrative. ‘When you put an already existing image in front of a camera,’ Prince has said, ‘you know what you’re going to get. You’ve taken out the decisive moment.’ In his 1983 essay on cowboys he added: ‘Some people would like to try to change places, just for a day, with maybe someone they admired or even envied, to see what it would be like, to see if it would be what they’d always heard it would be.’

‘Richard Prince: Early Photography’, 5 October - 22 December 2023, Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill and 17–19 Davies Street, London 

gagosian.com

Few figures could unite the likes of Hilton Als, Naomi Campbell, Elton John, Spike Lee, Sally Mann, Polly Mellen, Kate Moss, Chloë Sevigny, Taryn Simon, Christy Turlington, and Jonas Wood in shared admiration. 

But Richard Avedon has, albeit posthumously, in a new exhibition at Gagosian, New York. ‘Avedon 100’ invited almost 150 acclaimed cultural movers and shakers to select an Avedon photograph and share a personal story of their connection to the image and the artist on the centenary of his birth. 

The enormity of Avedon’s influence can be seen across photography today; how he put personality front and centre, how he distilled his subjects, while always understanding ‘All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth…I’m not interested in the truth.’ 

This openness to complexity is evident in the evolution of his aesthetic approach throughout his career, from his contrast-heavy portraits, the In the American West series, his records of the social justice movement, as well as his boundary-breaking fashion photography; all of which have inspired new generations of artists to be open, connect with their subjects, and most importantly to take risks. 

Avedon’s stories demonstrate his ability to peel back the polished veneer of world leaders, collaborate with models to create theatre within a moment and tell stories about injustices. But the common thread throughout these eclectic themes and approaches is how working with Avedon became an education for those lucky enough to have met him – his was a power to draw out our own creative desires. 

Together, these inspiring, entertaining and thoughtful reflections on Avedon’s life and work form a visual and anecdotal chorus demonstrating his power to form wide-ranging cultural touchpoints that go far beyond their originator. 

'Avedon 100' is on view at Gagosian 522 West 21st Street, New York, until 7 July 2023. gagosian.com

When Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas arrived at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1983, its first modern appearance outside Italy, it was still unseen by many. The masterpiece was one of Titian’s last, and tells Ovid’s tragic story of the satyr Marsyas, who, after losing a flute-playing contest to the god Apollo, was punished with a cruel, prolonged death. Audiences were spellbound by its immense agony; flesh ripped from bone, bodies in frenzied motion, heightened by the Venetian artist’s uncharacteristically loose brushwork. 

Flaying of Marsyas also cast a spell over American artist Mary Weatherford – one of five contemporary creatives showcased by Wallpaper* guest editor Kelly Wearstler in her October 2022 issue takeover – when she first saw the painting in Rome a decade ago. ‘I was shocked’, she says. ‘I had seen violence depicted in painting before, but never like this. The characters attending the execution seem to take it in their stride, particularly the violinist who lays down a musical backdrop to the suffering. The name of the painting literally translated from Italian is “The Punishment of Marsyas”, which resonates with me because, in theory, punishment should be fair. This punishment – for hubris or ignorance? – seems outsized, to put it mildly.’ 

Weatherford imagined an entire exhibition of abstract paintings dedicated to Titian’s. In April this year, that exhibition, ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’, came to life at Venice’s Palazzo Grimani, coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale. ‘I wanted to remake the painting again and again,’ she says. 

While Titian’s painting was dropping jaws in 1980s London, Weatherford was studying art at Princeton. ‘Postmodernism was in the air,’ she recalls. ‘I interpreted it to say I had permission to use whatever style I wanted to get my point across.’ It’s this curiosity for history and openness to shapeshifting that has defined the artist’s career and seen her become one of the pivotal painters of her generation. 

Though her work might now be characterised by broad, gestural brushstrokes with layered colours and paint viscosities, it wasn’t always this way. The artist has moved through chapters of disparate painterly styles – from assemblages involving shells, sponges, and starfish to razor-sharp abstraction, image appropriation and photography – in which themes such as gender and architecture rub up against each other. One constant, though, has been painting horizontally, on the floor or a table. ‘This approach has been the same for 30 years,’ she says. ‘I just commissioned a platform that can be perfectly levelled. I can pour liquid colour onto a canvas stapled to the platform, and the paint doesn’t move.’

Her artistic influences have ranged far and wide – ‘you name it, it’s in there’, she says – but one stands out: the American folk musician Dave Van Ronk, with whom Weatherford studied guitar in the 1990s. ‘For three years on Thursday evenings, I went for lessons at his apartment on Sheridan Square in New York,’ she recalls. ‘He taught me how to practise, and that carried over to painting. Van Ronk was one of my great art teachers.’

Another pivotal moment arrived in 2012. While a visiting artist at California State University, Weatherford was driving around the small city of Bakersfield. She was struck by the array of neon signs cladding factories, shops, restaurants and advertisements. For The Bakersfield Project, 2012, Weatherford first incorporated the sinuous rods of neon that would go on to define her best-known paintings. Evoking hand-drawn lines, her neon ebbs and flows above her vast linen canvases (including those on show at Palazzo Grimani) like divine interventions or industrial interruptions – a searing, retina-marking counterpoint to her sombre palette of blacks, greys, purples and accents of silver. 

Her art has offered feminist reworkings of the male-dominated colour field and reconfigured the path for landscape painting. ‘I think of landscapes as the eyes of history,’ says Weatherford, who often draws on the expansive vistas and ethereal light of her home state of California. ‘For the most part, landscapes are stable and immutable. Events happen in them, mostly leaving no trace. But the landscape is always there as a witness.’

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas is a horror story in its purest form; a potent example of man’s cruelty to another. In Weatherford’s response – ongoing in a series of woodblock prints on Japanese paper – it’s the absence of bodies that allows for the presence of humanity.

INFORMATION

‘The Flaying of Marsyas’ is at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, until 27 November 2022

gagosian.com, polomusealeveneto.beniculturali.it

A version of this article appears in the October 2022 Legends Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

For the Athens-bound, the well-known mix of Greek sun, sea and classical antiquity may feel like an obvious draw, but do not be distracted by the clichés; there are riches aplenty far beyond these in the Greek capital's cultural scene. Following almost a decade of financial troubles, topped by the challenges brought by the pandemic, Athens is now, again, on the up. Parts of the city are being rethought through art, including an unexpected corner of Piraeus, and the Pedion Areos park; some of the capital's most iconic 20th-century heritage is being given a new lease of life – there’s the ongoing renovation of the former Hilton hotel, one of Athens’ most iconic modernist buildings, into a new city destination, as well as the Fix brewery and Piraeus Tower; and a wealth of stylish hotels and eateries are opening all over town. And all that is on top of the Greek capital's existing charms and cultural haunts. Here, we pick some of the finest Athens architecture, design and art currently on offer, and flag up some of the exciting projects coming up in the Mediterranean metropolis. All you need to do is hop on an Aegean flight. 

Athens architecture and more

Piraeus art district

The ancient port of Piraeus has proven to be the capital's newest art hub, with a trio of international galleries flocking to the neighbourhood of Agios Dionysios (also known as Papastratos, from the namesake tobacco brand that had its factory there in the last century). Rodeo, Carwan and The Intermission have each recently launched an outpost there, bringing contemporary art and design to the industrial landscape of this part of the city. The area has more coming up, with modern workspace and some residential projects courtesy of local design-led developer Dimand, as well as the Piraeus Tower at its doorstep (more below).

Mona

The little sister of the established Shila hotel in Kolonaki, Mona is the freshest addition to central Athens' hospitality scene. The brainchild of creative director Eftihia Stefanidi and entrepreneur Shai Antebi, Mona is not just a hotel. Located in an eight-storey industrial factory from the 1950s in the edgy Monastiraki district, it features 20 rooms, a concept café, lounge and bar, and a speakeasy basement venue, as well as a members’ club rooftop terrace. The space has been styled with immaculate attention to detail, merging contemporary art and design objects from independent local designers as well as the owner's own design studio (Shila Maison d’Objets). Every beautiful piece found in the rooms can be purchased, and happenings make this stay as fun as it could possibly be.

The Ellinikon Experience Centre

When the new Eleftherios Venizelos airport opened in Athens in time for the 2004 Athens Olympics, its predecessor, Ellinikon airport, was left neglected and without purpose. After a few years spent working out how best to use its prime real-estate draws (located beside the beach and across a surface larger than the whole city-state of Monaco) and architectural heritage (it includes a main building, often referred to as the East Terminal, by midcentury modernist Eero Saarinen and created in 1959-63), it is now being redesigned by Lamda Development in stages as a mixed-use complex along with an extensive park. The Ellinikon Experience Centre, a reimagined airplane hangar, acts as a visitor centre for the area's redevelopment, telling the story of what was and what’s to come. The projects included feature local and international architecture studios, such as Kengo Kuma, Foster + Partners (see below) and Doxiadis+. 

M18

If you want to experience the city like a true Athenian, book a stay at M18. The rental, owned by Oliaros – the real estate powerhouse behind a string of design-led homes in the boutique island of Antiparos – used to be the company director’s own home. It is also right next to the Acropolis museum and hill, as well as the green expanses of Filopappou Hill, right in the heart of Athens. The property, originally built in 1923, consists of three units of different sizes that are available for short- or long-term stays. Interiors have been sensitively refreshed by architect Argyro Pouliovali of ARP - Architecture Research + Practice, and graced with the owner’s personal art and design collection. This includes work by a mix of Greek and international artists, a Gio Ponti dining table, Alvaro Siza lighting, Flos pieces, traditional azeri carpets, a Bang & Olufsen sound system and Martino Gamper garden furniture.

Piraeus Tower 

This tower is not only the tallest in Piraeus but also the second tallest in the whole of Greece. Now, local design-savvy developer Dimand, alongside emerging Athens architecture studio Pila (founded by Ilias Papageorgiou, who relocated from New York, leaving a partner position at SO-IL in 2019 to set up on his own), the 1970s building is being reimagined for the 21st century, bringing together modern workspace, generous retail and food and beverage elements, and public green spaces. Combining sustainable principles with sleek design, as well as urban gestures in the form of a raised, green public pathway that connects the tower to the port, creating a welcome promenade, the refreshed tower is set to be completed in late 2023.

Gagosian Athens

Set within a majestic building masterfully redesigned by Kois Associated Architects, in the urbane Kolonaki district, Gagosian Athens has not one, but two worthy offerings for the art-savvy traveller this autumn, uniting the worlds of fine art and high design. Sarah Sze launches her first solo exhibition in Greece here, blending new oil and collage panel paintings, and small-scale sculptures and video installations from existing work, in a show that merges the physical and the digital worlds. At the same time, Marc Newson draws inspiration from Greece, and in particular the islands, to put together an exhibition of new cloisonné and cast glass furniture, exploring materials, processes, and skills, and neatly following on from his partial takeover of Gagosian’s retail location in Burlington Arcade in London this summer. 
Sarah Sze, Early September - October 2022
Marc Newson, October / November 2022

Estiatorio and Ksenodoxeio Milos

The Milos restaurant (Estiatorio Milos) is well known in culinary circles for serving the finest fish in town and now its brand-new venue by London- and Athens-based studio Divercity Architects means it has some fine design to boast too. Sleek, seamless design featuring swathes of white marble, including a sculptural staircase, and minimalist decor mirror the beauty in simplicity found in the restaurant's dishes. Additionally, its new location, just a stone's throw from the heart of Athens and Syntagma Square, also comprises a chic hotel offering, Xenodocheio Milos, created by the same practice and featuring warm wood and elegant, contemporary interiors. 

Marina Tower by Foster + Partners 

Foster + Partners is behind one of the first residential schemes to be revealed at the redeveloped Ellinikon airport – while also masterplanning the whole estate. The Marina Tower is located right on the Athens Riviera, hailing its contemporary residential vision for this newly formed corner of the city. Surrounded by green expanses and blue waters, the project aims to be Greece’s first eco-conscious skyscraper, created following principles of sustainable architecture, as well as offering open-air planted terraces for residents. The tower is set to complete by 2026. 

National Museum of Contemporary Art Αthens (EMST) 

The former Fix brewery in central Athens has been a city landmark since its creation in 1963 by Greek modernist Takis Zenetos – for its elegant lines, but also its sheer scale, dubbed by locals the ‘horizontal skyscraper’. Following a lengthy redesign process, the building was recently reopened as the National Museum of Contemporary Art Αthens (EMST), reimagined by 3SK Stylianidis Architects, in collaboration with Kalliope Kontozoglou, I Mouzakis & Associates-Architects Ltd, and Tim Ronalds Architects, ready to lend its vast expanses to art displays. Unfortunately, the museum launched just as the pandemic started, so had to remain closed to visitors for a while, but it is now reopening with a bang and a wealth of cultural programming, including temporary exhibitions, special projects and dedicated foyer commissions by local and international artists.

Delta at the Niarchos Foundation

The cultural hub and green lung that is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens’ southern residential district of Kallithea has been open since 2016 – but one of its most prominent spaces, the contemporary restaurant at the complex’s very top, only just opened in the past year. Designed by Kois Associated Architects, Delta offers an open, flowing interior that allows the gaze to wander through its warm composition, and towards the striking city views from its glazed walls. Inside, contemporary, abstract shapes, such as the bar’s organic form – a functional sculpture specially made by artists Voukenas Petrides – create physical centrepieces for the diners within the otherwise minimalist architectural experience.

NEON

This expansive new cultural space sits within a remarkable renovation of the city’s former Public Tobacco Factory – a majestic, historical building from the 1930s, which was later used as the Hellenic Parliament Library and Printing House. NEON was founded in 2013 by collector and entrepreneur Dimitris Daskalopoulos and moved into its current home in 2021, promising a mix of contemporary art forms, wide community engagement and public space for all in its vast halls. Here, industrial architecture meets modern art, in a redesign led by architect Fanis Kafantaris.

Athens Design Forum 2022 

The Athens Design Forum, a festival dedicated to promoting Greek design, art and architecture, is back, following a successful first year featuring buildings such as the Kypseli house of Greek modernist Aristomenis Provelengios. Now, the late Athens artist Alekos Fassianos takes centre stage and the forum opens his island home in Kea, an Aegean retreat that is just a one-hour ferry journey from Athens. In collaboration with The Alekos Fassianos Estate, this will be the inaugural opening of the Fassianos residence and atelier, where visitors can enjoy his art as well as the home's typical regional island architecture of humble, white, low forms. The public launch takes place on 10 July 2022.

INFORMATION
discovergreece.com

Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias is having a Mayfair moment this summer, with a large-scale commission for the Royal Academy’s Annenberg Courtyard and her first solo exhibition with Gagosian, where she is presenting new and recent works. The first non-architect to be awarded the Royal Academy Architecture Prize in 2020, Iglesias has created site-specific installations and immersive environments that sit in dialogue with buildings by some of the world’s most renowned architects – among them, the Renzo Piano-designed Centro Botín in Santander and Norman Foster’s Bloomberg Headquarters in London. Her organic formations are crafted in pitch-perfect medleys of metals such as bronze and steel, stone, ceramic and concrete, often combined with running water.

Ahead of the unveiling of her site-specific installation for the Royal Academy and commission for New York’s Madison Square Park, we spoke to the Madrid-based artist about how the pandemic has shifted perceptions of public spaces, the parallels between art and architecture, and creating places of refuge in cities.

Wallpaper*: How has the pandemic changed your relationship with public spaces and the work you create for them?

Cristina Iglesias: The experience of the past two years has not changed but rather reinforced my belief in the need to create public places where people can meet with people they know or encounter strangers and have different experiences. Some public places where my works are installed have become more integral than ever to the daily social life of towns and cities, such as a plaza, a park or an island. Consequently, the ways in which the works influence people's interactions with one another are as important as the ways in which individuals react to the works.  

During the pandemic many people moved away from their physical working environments into remote conditions – sometimes permanently – so the areas where my public works are situated became less populated for a while, such as the Square Mile in the City of London, where the Bloomberg Headquarters commission is located. That my work was being seen by far fewer people during that time probably created a completely different resonance.

W*: What parallels do you see between the way artists and architects create?

CI: We all share the sense of proportion, we all think about space and some of us about time. Our practices are rooted in aesthetics combined with a consideration of human behaviour and response. But while architects have to think more about being functional in a physical way – for example, employing protocols and processes with regard to safety and practicality – artists can approach questions from any perspective and art can function psychologically and poetically.

W*: How do you approach creating work for public space and ensuring there is harmony between your installation and its surroundings?

CI: Well, that’s always the main challenge. There is where the sense of proportion has to work – at every level. The brief is all-important as that sets certain initial parameters. One must listen attentively to the given brief, looking carefully at how the space is currently used and imagining how that could be transformed by the presence of sculpture. Active dialogue with the site and the involved parties – local people, urban planners, architects, engineers – is crucial. 

As an artist, I am seeking to create a counterpoint between what exists and what I want to put there. I’m not trying to recreate nature.

W*: Tell us about your site-specific commission for the Royal Academy

CI: Wet Labyrinth (With Spontaneous Landscape) is a play with perception. It creates an experience for the viewer entering inside where the real (the structure and the outside world), the fiction (the cast walls), and the reflection (the mirrored panels) intertwine in an intense way. The sense of humidity inside the structure together with the sound of water falling on the ground adds other dimensions: even in the heart of a bustling city, these visual, sonic and textural qualities can provide the viewer with a sense of refuge and respite. And the idea of flowing water has been employed across centuries to create a sense of transcendence, embodying the feeling of being transported to a place beyond the actual. Around the wet labyrinth with its mineral (slate) external skin, the ‘spontaneous landscape’ adds a vibrant notion of nature.

Generally, my artistic language concerns the play between interior and exterior, concealing and revealing through visually porous structures, controlling sight-lines, and introducing uncanny or unfamiliar elements into a given environment to signal the presence of art. And given that many of my works can be installed both indoors and outdoors, I like the idea that viewers find their own way of interacting with them. 

Similarly, for the Gagosian Davies Street exhibition, designed to complement the Royal Academy commission, the space appealed to me because the very wide plate-glass window frontage in the middle of Mayfair offers street-level visibility for the work, creating a dynamic between interior and exterior and allowing public engagement at any time. Even when the gallery closes in the evening, it remains lit and so it is visually accessible to passers-by – like a film frame. 

W*: What did it mean to you to win the 2020 Royal Academy Architecture Prize?

CI: It was a beautiful surprise! It provoked in me a sense of complicity with architecture, which was always present, but it was essential for me to know that the architects felt the same.

W*: How do you bring the experience of intimacy and refuge to a public space, especially in a city?

CI: Wet Labyrinth was to have been presented two years ago, before the pandemic and the mandate of social distancing. I work with panels and screens to enclose space and render it interior and intimate. Now intimacy is an issue and so we had to give this serious consideration when designing the work. With Wet Labyrinth, I ask the viewer to spend time experiencing it as they pass through from one end to the other.

W*: What role do texture and materiality play in your practice? 

CI: I am very interested in all the nuances that happen in vision both close-up and from a distance – the details, the evolving patinas and organisms that time adds are essential. I am a sculptor so texture and materiality are key. I mould with wax and cast from life and from my imagination to create hybrid surfaces and forms. The look and feel of my work is very important, what the sculptures represent and how the environment around them reacts. For example, in the case of my underwater installation Garden in the Sea, in Baja, California, we spent years working intensively with marine scientists to ensure the materials and structure positively encourage coral growth and biodiversity.

W*: At the same time as your London moment, you have another major public artwork opening in New York

CI: I created Landscape and Memory working with the knowledge of the ancient Cedar Creek that coursed beneath what is now Madison Park. It is a project that talks about geology and landscape: water – via a hydraulic mechanism – runs through the cast bronze elements embedded as a parcours in specifically excavated areas and grasses grow higher along the line that traces the underground river. Hopefully, this scenography creates a connection and fluidity that makes visitors to the park consider the importance of the life and its history that exists under our feet and the cities we construct.

INFORMATION

‘Cristina Iglesias’, until 30 July, Gagosian Davies Street, gagosian.com

‘Wet Labyrinth (With Spontaneous Landscape)’, early June through summer, royalacademy.org.uk

‘Cristina Iglesias: Landscape and Memory’, until 4 December, Madison Square Park, madisonquarepark.org

For centuries, Black Americans have built, maintained and improved coping strategies to overcome countless barriers to their safety and success. Drawing creative inspiration from oral traditions, spiritual practices and learned experience, they have sought and converted spaces to occupy and define.

This multigenerational feat has long been the expertise of the New York-based critic and curator Antwaun Sargent. For his first show as a director at Gagosian, Sargent has gathered a range of artists at different stages of their career, working in different media, but who all have the same goal: creating and dissecting space for the betterment of themselves and their communities.

‘Social Works’, which opened on 24 June at Gagosian’s West 24th Street gallery, showcases site-specific works by David Adjaye, Theaster Gates, Linda Goode Bryant, Rick Lowe, Titus Kaphar and many others. The show (and Sargent’s role at Gagosian) builds on over ten years of conversations with Black American artists. In this time he has started fires and put them out, curated shows and authored books, written diatribes and offered anecdotes. Every project Sargent takes on is broached with searing criticality, a staunchly realistic interpretation of what is and what can be, all presented with an unapologetic undertone of self-advancement. With, of course, the caveat that his own advancement swings a pendulum that hits many other notes on its way.

Outside of his published writing – pieces for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Interview, to name a few, plus two books, The New Black Vanguard (accompanied by an exhibition at the Aperture Foundation) and Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists – Sargent has also helped shape the art world in subtler ways. He is known for engaging in conversations over messages and group chats with artists and curators, friends and foes alike, and in Facebook battles, where he rarely has the first word but often the last. In these channels, he has tackled Black agency, moral responsibility within representation and presentation, and the eternal question of formal artistic merit.

Sargent is forthright, unafraid of failure, and constantly assessing and reassessing his practice and point of view. This pattern of self-regulation and self-education influences the products of his labour in many ways. In the case of his Gagosian show, his work ethic and perspective are evident in a curatorial prompt that is both ephemeral and solid.

‘Social Works’ balances its star-studded roster with emerging and mid-career talents. Among them are members of NXTHVN, the arts incubator founded by Titus Kaphar, Jason Price and Jonathan Brand, whose works reflect varied practices, backgrounds and concerns: Allana Clarke is currently working through the NXTHVN fellowship, while Alexandria Smith, Zalika Azim, Kenturah Davis and Christie Neptune are all 2019 studio alumni. Bridging the gap between the NXTHVN cohort and household names such as Theaster Gates or Carrie Mae Weems, are artists including Lauren Halsey, a trained architect whose family has resided in South Central Los Angeles for generations. She mines personal memories and local history, reshuffling realities to imagine possible futures. Site-specific sculptures play a central role in her practice: sometimes monochromatic, sometimes bursting with colour, they harness found, reworked or finely fabricated materials, consuming the viewer’s every sense. On social media, she names her vision #FUBUarchitecture, after FUBU (For Us, by Us), a Black streetwear brand that shot to fame in the 1990s.

In her ‘box’ sculptures, Halsey assembles brightly-hued acrylic cuboids on top of each other, embellishing them with grafitti-like messaging, and elements from discarded and nostalgic signage – honouring the streets of her storied neighbourhood, as well as the life force held within it. In other works, she uses synthetic hair, gypsum, wood (which she carves by hand), foam, carpet and cement to create Afrofuturist potentialities that zing with the urgency of a Black woman who knows that civic change is the only option. 

Another highlight of the exhibition is a contribution from David Adjaye, an architect with deep ties to the art world. Best known in the US for his National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, he also designed Lorna Simpson’s Brooklyn studio (see W*228) and the 2012 exhibition ‘Richard Avedon: Murals & Portraits’ at Gagosian New York. Varied though his practice is, rarely does Adjaye embark on entirely non-functional projects. ‘I interviewed David for Interview magazine in 2015, focusing on architecture,’ recalls Sargent. ‘For “Social Works”, Adjaye has created his first piece of large-scale sculpture, which will also be the first piece of fine art that he’s shown in the States.’ The monumental work is made from compacted earth, which Sargent sees as ‘a call to reconsider the value of certain materials’. It dovetails materially with the architect’s plans for the Edo Museum of West African Art, in Benin City, Nigeria, home to one of the oldest kingdoms in the world. Intended to house the Benin Bronzes upon their return to Africa, the museum project also entails an excavation of its site to uncover ancient architectural remnants. 

Another seasoned artist, Carrie Mae Weems, is represented by photographs from her ongoing series Roaming and Museums (which began in 2006), in which she stands in, or in front of, museums, well-known streets and ‘architectural wonders’, directly confronting the inclusivity (or lack thereof) of these supposedly public spaces. She wears an elegant but nondescript black dress, highlighting her regal form, planting her within each image like a Greek caryatid, immovable and required for the support and continuance of a structure.

Linda Goode Bryant, who is creating an interactive work for the show, has been a fixture in New York’s art and activism circles for the last 50 years, founding New York’s first Black-run gallery, Just Above Midtown, in 1974. Bryant’s non-linear trajectory has included filmmaking, farming and entrepreneurship. For ‘Social Works’ she drew inspiration from her work with Project Eats, the urban farming venture she started in 2009, to create a living sculpture, Are we really that different. Made in collaboration with architect Liz Diller, it will grow and provide food for gallery visitors free of charge – a first for Gagosian.

Rick Lowe founded the non-profit Project Row Houses in 1993 to house and inspire the Black community of Houston’s Third Ward neighbourhood, providing a case study and format for creative, economically-engaged, collective healing. He will show pieces from his Black Wall Street series. ‘The series is an extension of the social work I do. It is an investigation into the economic plight of African Americans, manifested in an abstract form,’ explains the artist, whose work defies the white, mainstream custom (both within historical and contemporary social and economic contexts) to only represent Black people in wholly inaccurate, negative ways that are uninspiring and unhelpful to the Black community. 

Particularly, Lowe has engaged with the history of Greenwood, a prosperous neighbourhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was known as ‘Black Wall Street’ in the early 20th century, and similar bursts of economic progress in Durham, North Carolina and Richmond, Virginia. ‘The Black Wall Street journey was threatening to mainstream society, which is why the burning of Greenwood happened,’ says Lowe, referring to the 1921 massacre and destruction of the economically successful and independent African American community in Greenwood, by nearby white communities and the KKK, who colluded with the US government. 

In the 1990s, Lowe led a group of artists who purchased, gutted and renovated a series of 1930s shotgun houses in Houston’s Third Ward, with limited financial resources and calling on helping hands within their community. Now, nearly 30 years on, Project Row Houses serves as an example of what can be built and sustained independently within the Black community with no external aid, subtly echoing Halsey’s ‘FUBU’ sentiment. ‘That’s one of the vital steps towards economic emancipation, understanding the value that we as Black people have and being able to access it and cash in on it,’ says Lowe. Sargent’s choice to show works by such established social excavators alongside those of the younger artists Alexandria Smith and Christie Neptune exemplifies his ability to colour outside the lines, while maintaining a tight curatorial premise. 

Smith, who has been head of the painting programme at London’s Royal College of Art since 2019, has produced work from the moment she could pick up a pen (or crayon). ‘My mother says that I have been calling myself an artist since I was three.’ She works in oil and acrylic, slicing and adding layers to create scenes somewhere between reality and a dream. Her figures, erroneously referred to as grotesque by white critics and curators, are embodiments of the queer, Black, female experience the artist inhabits. Limbs and halved gestures appear independent of full-body forms, a collage in themselves, beckoning the viewer’s attention. 

Neptune, who is presenting a piece from her ongoing series Constructs and Context Relativity, is also an educator, albeit of elementary school students. Before, between and after lessons, Neptune pieces together her students’ experiences and queries to inform her work. ‘Most of the ideas I have for my projects come from my class,’ says the artist. ‘I make the work and try to live it by teaching it, but also by creating spaces for younger adults to discuss it and actualise it.’ 

In Constructs and Context Relativity – Performance II (2021), Neptune explores relational theories of space, social politics and her own internal experiences. ‘When conceptualising a work, I look at the space in which we live – social constructs that don’t have the semblance of physicality in them, but are still very real.’ The work is a mental voyage, occupying space with the same logic and form as a tesseract. Space is not the artist’s only concern though. Time also takes centre stage, with the work of the Italian futurists providing intellectual fodder. 

The bringing together of such a varied group, in terms of age, medium and form, is characteristic of Sargent’s ambition. Neptune, who is 35, speaks of age affording her another level of nuance, her past and present selves melding to create more expansive work. The same could be said for the show in its entirety – Sargent has brought together artists at every stage of their career, with differing but interconnected stories, all ripe for discussion, serving as the perfect catalysts for introspection and its logical follower, change. The works on view come together to create the many-sided structure of the Black American experience, with its endless facets, offering individual and meaningful vantage points. The show belongs to these artists, but it is also a real testament to Sargent’s breadth as a thinker. 

Few contemporary figures are as agile in their navigation of a both perilous and still largely stodgy art world. In an early adulthood dedicated to education and discovery, Sargent has cultivated a fearlessly non-traditional approach, which has proven wildly addictive to the art world elite. His jagged ascent, including a stint teaching kindergarten, writing catalogues for Arthur Jafa and Mickalene Thomas, and giving a TEDx Talk on Art and the #blacklivesmatter Revolution, reveals the success that can come from the right cocktail of determination, analytical rigour, and a willingness to fumble about. And that success is now on view for the benefit of any willing and able visitor.

INFORMATION
‘Social Works’, until 13 August, Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York. gagosian.com

antwaunsargent.com

The work of Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão is entrenched in hybridity, juxtaposition and uneasy contradiction. The discipline of painting is stretched to its extremes as she reifies the legacy of Brazil's colonial past, pluralist identities, disparate cultures, religion, eroticism, Modernism, cannibalism, and plenty in between. 

At Gagosian, New York, Varejão – who lives in an Oscar Niemeyer-designed house in Rio de Janeiro – is unveiling new works. In Ruína Brasilis (Brasilis Ruin), a towering column simulates tiled walls (specifically, Talavera tiles, more of which later), and flesh. Chaotic, pulsating and impulsive red viscera explodes with erotic charge from cold, linear structure, a reminder that the legacies in Varejão’s work once lived, and live on. The work’s surface nods to the national colours of Brazil; its rupturing innards suggest Baroque theatrics or political decay.

Elsewhere, signs of life arrive under a different guise as Varejão unveils the latest in her ‘tile’ paintings. The series began in the late 1980s and drew on the azulejos, glazed terra-cotta tiles of Arab origin, used widely in Portuguese art since the Middle Ages and transported to Brazil through colonisation. This time, Varejão delves into the culture of Talavera poblana, a Mexican and Spanish ceramic tradition that, like the azulejos, interweaves variegated historical and social interactions. 

The creative process for these works is largely dictated by chance. Varejão smothers a square canvas with a thick layer of plaster. As it dries, cracks shatter the surface. Deep in the resulting fissures lurks the violence that has shaped Latin America’s past, its histories obscured by multifaceted colonialism, and a profound beauty which, like the Talavera poblana, feels difficult to place.

Wallpaper*: Where are you as we speak? 

Adriana Varejão: I am in Costa Rica with my family, quarantining in advance of my New York exhibition ‘Talavera’ at  Gagosian [running until 26 June], after several years of planning and working. After some difficult months in Brazil, we are now in a kind of paradise, sitting in front of a volcano with a forest full of birds! Costa Rica is impressively preoccupied with ecology and sustainability, with a very structured approach. It is saddening to see how Brazil, with the same or even more potential, is being destroyed by the incumbent political regime that works against the country's health and best long-term interests.

W*: Your home in Rio de Janeiro was designed by Oscar Niemeyer. How did you find the space, and what is your relationship with modern architecture?

AV: Growing up in Brazil amongst some of the great modern architecture of the world makes one very aware. In addition to Niemeyer's public buildings, I know many of his houses and always hoped to experience living in one. We found our current home by word of mouth, in very bad condition but with beautiful bones and a spectacular location at the foot of an old quarry.

We then embarked on a four-year programme to restore and renew it with a contemporary Brazilian architect, Lia Siqueira, and landscape designer Isabel Duprat, who remained faithful to Niemeyer’s aesthetic and lifestyle principles while upgrading the house into a functional contemporary home for a growing family and friends. When we were almost finished, the property next door became available so we acquired it as well to create a larger private garden environment.

W*: What was the first piece of art you remember seeing, and how did it make you feel? 

AV: Brasilia was inaugurated in 1960, and I spent my childhood there. I had this sense of living in a total work of art, largely created by Oscar Niemeyer and the artist Athos Bulcão, working together on architecture and tile mural designs.

W*: Which artists, writers, thinkers or musicians have had the biggest impact on you?

AV: Most importantly, the miscegenated nature and culture of the Brazilian Baroque, both religious and secular; the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy and his books, Written on a Body and Barroco. With regard to music, there are too many influences to name here, but I guess in the beginning it was Milton Nascimento, and in general Brazilian choro and samba music, both complex popular musical forms that are still vibrant today.

W*: Your work has long explored the pluralism of Brazilian identity, themes of miscegenation, memory, and decolonial narratives. How has your approach to work, or priorities, evolved since the early days of your career?

AV: I am currently planning a major retrospective exhibition at Pinacoteca di São Paulo in Brazil in 2022, curated by the museum’s director Jochen Volz. Together we are revisiting my earliest paintings as a starting point. I realise just how much these oil paintings on canvas provided the basis for so much of the work that followed in different mediums and forms. All the themes that you mention and more have been present in my life and in my work from the outset, although at the time we did not have the precise language. Ideas for my art have always been in the territory of hybridity and I continue to pursue them in ever more diverse ways today.

W*: Many of your pieces have included painted forms that resemble raw meat, contained within tiled forms or flatter surfaces. What draws you to this motif?

AV: My so-called ‘ruinas de charques’ or ‘meat ruins’ serve as metaphors for uncompleted time. They indicate the fragility of tradition, the precariousness inherent in the concept of planning, and the instability of values in countries like Brazil where discontinuity is the rule. They represent the imminent time of the decomposition of the flesh. I also associate meat with eroticism, a material exacerbation: this chaotic, pulsating matter, the exposed, excessive, visceral meat provokes an erotic charge, bringing life to the tiled ruins. And, of course, given that this representation of flesh and blood is simulated in paint and canvas, I am invoking the corporeal drama of the theatrical Baroque.

In your  Gagosian exhibition, you’ll be presenting a new work inspired by the culture of the Portuguese azulejo, and the Mexican Talavera ceramic traditions. What sparked your interest in these and what was the process of creating the pieces?

In the late 1980s, I began researching azulejos, the glazed terracotta tiles of Arab origin that have been the most widely used form of decoration in Portugal, brought to Brazil through colonisation and trade. Over many years, through firsthand research, I have assembled a vast archive of references for them. I developed my special technique for the ‘tile’ paintings by covering a square canvas with a thick layer of plaster and allowing it to dry over time to produce a surface with deep fissures resembling crackled porcelain. 

My most recent tile paintings explore the culture of Talavera poblana, the Mexican ceramic tradition originating from the Spanish city of Talavera de la Reina. Like the azulejo, it draws on equally diverse sources. When I was travelling in Mexico in the mid-1990s, I photographed a wall of Talavera tiles. This formed the basis for the painting on canvas Parede Mexicana (1999). Twenty years later, this painting became an indexical reference for an entirely new body of work where I adapted and enlarged key motifs from individual tiles to the scale of 70 x 70 inch (180 x 180cm) square canvases.

In this transfigurative process, the motifs shift into a broader signifying register of artistic and cultural references. I love these unexpected artistic crossroads; by interweaving time, culture, and place, I seek to establish dialogues between aesthetic systems once segregated by dominant narratives, and in so doing question entrenched assumptions about the life of forms in art.

W*: What is the most challenging project you've worked on to date?

AV: My eponymous pavilion at Inhotim in Brumadinho. From the outset of the commission, I worked with the architect Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez to create a project where the architecture was a complete piece of art with the artworks it was designed to house, from the ground up – from the galleries to the roof terrace and its benches tiled with my own designs, to the outdoor water element that penetrates the building itself.

W*: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read, watched or listened to within the last month?

AV: The ideas of the radical Spanish philosopher Paul Preciado, who is so widely read now in Latin America. He is writing an essay for my new monograph that  Gagosian will publish with Rizzoli in 2022!

In our ongoing At Home With profile series

INFORMATION
Adriana Varejão, ‘Talavera’, until 26 June 2021, Gagosian, New York
gagosian.com

ADDRESS

522 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011

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As widely-recognised as the creative polymath Theaster Gates is, his latest show at Gagosian New York, significantly titled ‘Black Vessel’, is still the artist’s first-ever solo exhibition in the Big Apple. A majestic display of sculpture, clay vessels and works on canvas, the exhibition showcases Gates’ poetic ability to layer facets of art history, sound, racial ideology, culture and Black history in a practice that stands for both social empowerment and cultural reclamation.

For this momentous showing, Gates presents four genres of work. In an ode to the title of the exhibition, he has first assembled a collection of 30 vessels, each unique in size, shape and form. With one eye considering the vessel as an archetype through the canon of art history, Gates creates his own versions as a metaphor of contemporary existence, as one might expect.

‘I always find myself returning to the vessel. It is part of the intellectual life force of my practice and it precedes all other forms of making,’ he states, nodding to his training as a potter.

In Gates’ hands, the universality of the vessel as a repository of ritualised significance is put to the fore. His series of large-scale pieces, made from glazed and fired clay, not only draw from the ancient traditions of Eastern, Western and African origins, but also from contemporary aesthetics too. Freestanding or paired with specially made plinths and pedestals, the array of forms and silhouettes elude time and place with their wonderfully varied textures, surfaces and tones.

The archaeological-like display of ceramics is poignantly offset by the west gallery – an enveloping chamber made of black bricks, upcycled from remaindered stock, that stands almost like a vessel itself. Complemented by a sound installation scored by Gates, the installation adds another spiritual dimension to viewing the statuesque objects.

Intervening with space is also the foundation of another arresting work, Walking Prayer, which is ongoing since 2018 and utilises a wide-ranging historical collection of published books on Black experience. The tomes are nobly displayed on vintage Carnegie cast iron shelving that transforms a library setting into a place of worship.

Speaking about his dynamic approach to his work, Gates shares, ‘My body is capital, my brain is capital, my hands are capital, and the byproducts of my hands are capital. And once I understand my own value, I think about spatial value, the value of other people, the value of people working together, the possibility of exponential value as a result of certain kinds of bodies rubbing up against each other.’

The final component of the show, a suite of tar paintings that are inspired by Gates’ father’s livelihood as a roofer, sees the artist manipulate typical building and construction materials like industrial oil-based enamel, rubber torch down, bitumen and wood, into imposing large-scale wall works that echo the style of postwar American artists.

Dynamic, self-referential and beautifully realised, the four-part survey of Gates’ artistic practice is a captivating reassurance of just how deep he is ready to go.

INFORMATION

’Black Vessel’, until 19 December, Gagosian, New York. gagosian.com

ADDRESS

Gagosian
555 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

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Perched atop a limestone promontory jutting out into the Tyrrhenian sea, Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri is regarded as one of the most spectacular houses in the world. Its enigmatic design was dreamt up in the 1930s by the Italian writer, film-maker, war correspondent and controversialist Curzio Malaparte, who built the house on a plot of land he bought in 1937, following his five-year internal exile at the hands of Mussolini.

Malaparte, who was an active participant in the avant-garde artistic and literary circles of his time, was known for facilitating between religious and political extremes and was said to refer to the house as ‘casa come me', meaning a house like me.

His design for Casa Malaparte, which blends classical and modernist influences, is dominated by a tapering exterior staircase that leads to a roof deck where a curving white windbreak arcs across the terrace.

To date, the easiest way of experiencing this architectural gem for most has been through Jean Luc Godard's 1963 film Contempt, in which it was prominently featured. However a new exhibition at Gagosian's Mayfair gallery brings London residents one step closer to the real thing. Malaparte’s youngest descendant and current owner of the house, Tommaso Rositani Suckert, has created a transportive exhibition that sees the Davies Street Gallery adapted to resemble the Casa's main room – a spartan stone-floored living room with breathtaking sea views. 'The salone, where the original pieces are located, is the “heart” of Casa Malaparte, and the most intense space in the house,' explains Rositani Suckert. ‘The large windows on each side of the room create a light which continuously changes and adds movement and shadow throughout the day.'

In Mayfair, the sea views are captured in a spectacular image taken by Thomas Lannes which can be seen through the gallery's Davies Street windows. The image has the same dimensions as the window in the Casa's living room and is intended to recreate the sensation of being in the house.

Within this set, Rositani Suckert has recreated an edition of three of the Salone's most important furniture pieces – a bench, table, and console with thick, sensual walnut tops and wide cylindrical legs sculpted in Italian pine, Carrara white marble, and travertine.

‘Much of my youth was spent amongst the pieces, but it was not until I matured and was surrounded by friends and guests of the house, many of whom are great artists and architects, that I truly came to feel and understand their importance,' says Rositani Suckert.  ‘Our goal throughout the process has been to develop modern recreations of the pieces, while paying respects to the essence and spirit of Casa Malaparte.'

All originally designed by Malaparte and made by local craftsmen, the reproductions are also crafted in Italy using locally-sourced materials. Each piece has been produced in an edition of twelve, plus two artist’s proofs.

In addition, a series of Baroque-styled porcelain pieces formerly owned by Malaparte, who had a passion for Meissen ceramics and Baccarat glasses, will be on show. These include floral-studded mirrors, candelabras and freestanding sculptures that were collected by Malaparte on his travels. They were originally displayed in the 'favorita' bedroom but in 1963, Jean-Luc Godard moved them to the salone to use them as part of the scenography for his film.

‘It’s absolutely perfect,' enthuses Rositani Suckert ahead of the opening. ‘The frame of the window is made from the exact Italian walnut used in the construction of the pieces. As you enter the space, you can feel the dialogue between the pieces, and you experience the quality of the Italian manufacturing and how solid and powerful the pieces are. The Gagosian team did a beautiful job in creating a harmony between them, which brings the visitor into another world.'

INFORMATION

‘Casa Malaparte Furniture’ is on view until 19 September at Gagosian Mayfair.

gagosian.com

ADDRESS

17–19 Davies Street London W1K 3DE

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If you were passing Gagosian’s Davies Street outpost in 2017, you could hardly have missed Alex Israel’s prints, blown up in the gallery’s windows like advertisments. Emblazoned across one stock photograph were the words: ‘Can 50 Million People Be Wrong? Probably.’ The exhibition – a collaboration with the writer Bret Easton Ellis – captured the essence of the cinematic language Israel is known for, dramatic and charismatic, and inspired by his perpetual, dichotomous muse, Los Angeles.

Almost three years later, Israel has returned to London, this time on his own, and in his own image. On view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until mid-March, ‘Always On My Mind’ is dedicated to the body of self-portraits that has played a persistent role in Israel’s practice for almost a decade. Cut from panels of fibreglass and painted with airbrush, they recall Hollywood studio props – little wonder, given the Los Angeles native’s previous collaboration with Warner Bros Studios in the last ten years.

While many artists prefer to subdue the influence of their personal world in their art, Israel instead uses cut-outs of his profile to not only delineate his physical self, but to remind us of the context that frames his works: the perspective that’s present in art but isn’t often as directly discernible. Israel explains, ‘I just think of myself as a context... and that’s where my Self-Portrait comes into play. It has become a kind of logo for this imagined context of me.’ In fact, the first Self-Portrait that Israel made was intended to be the logo for his 2011 web series As it Lays, in which he interviewed many of Los Angeles’ best loved celebrities.

Using himself as a context is a clever tactic for addressing the idea that all art is essentially a self-portrait, and in fact what Israel gives us is everything but the machinations of the personal inner world. From Wheel of Fortune to a view from the Griffith Observatory, these are open-ended portraits of what makes a person, fragments and clues but not the whole picture, connected to a wider landscape rather than intimate.

At the start of his career, Israel worked for artist John Baldessari, who passed away this month. They remained close. And you can trace the influence of Baldessari, for example, in the repetitious coloured dots faces he made in the 1980s and the formulaic structure of Israel’s Self-Portraits. But then, Baldessari would have certainly approved of that, once saying: ‘I think art, if it’s meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists.’

Whether it’s in pithy citations pasted across a window that shout to the street, a talk show with celebrities from his community, or Self-Portraits as a window to the world – conversation is exactly what Israel’s work is about. 

INFORMATION

‘Always On My Mind’, 16 January – 14 March, Gagosian Grosvenor Hill. gagosian.com

ADDRESS

Gagosian
20 Grosvenor Hill
London W1K 3QD

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Georg Baselitz believes every work of art is a self-portrait. Whether it’s a Mondrian colour puzzle or a Warhol printed tin, what we are looking at – and, Baselitz suggests, the subject we are really interested in – is the artist.

Some time ago, the German neo-expressionist, known for the upside down figures he has painted since the end of the 1960s, was visiting the Kunstmuseum in Basel. It was there he came across Henri Rousseau’s painting of the artist Marie Laurencin, muse to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, both clad in dark clothing and standing in a garden, pink flowers at their feet. Despite the title of the 1909 painting (The Muse Inspires the Poet), Baselitz took the portrait to be a self-portrait of Rousseau and his wife.

This interpretation of the painting – Baselitz wasn’t entirely wrong in seeing Rousseau’s sense of himself projected in the portrait – inspired a whole new direction in Baselitz’s work, about to go on show at Gagosian in New York. In this new body of work, Baselitz turns the heads of major artists on their heads (Mondrian and Warhol included) from a long line of famous American abstract expressionists, to artists more directly engaged with self-portraiture, such as Tracey Emin and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

The artist titles the exhibition ‘Devotion’, paying homage to the figures he portrays because he says, they are ‘especially meaningful to me’. Each of these portraits becomes, connected by Baselitz’s gaze and hand, a rumination on the artist and their work, both abstract and figurative, outward looking and self-reflexive. Willem de Kooning is drawn in classical, sober pose in charcoal; Philip Guston becomes a pale, pensive pink, not unlike the colour he often applied in his own work; while Rothko is rendered in a nervous, sad blue.

Baselitz was born in 1938 and his career began in the context of a postwar Germany searching for a sense of identity in the aftermath of genocide. Painting figures has sometimes been a difficult, painful exercise for an artist coming to terms with the horrors of egoism. Does this make all art narcissistic? Probably. But as Baselitz shows us through these self-portraits as others, self-enquiry can be a rough road.

In May 2019, coinciding with the Venice Biennale, a major Georg Baselitz survey curated by Kosme de Barañano will open at the Gallerie dell’Accademia – the first exhibition by a living artist to be staged at the museum.

INFORMATION

‘Devotion’ is on view from 24 January – 16 March. For more information, visit the Gagosian website

ADDRESS

Gagosian
555 West 24th Street
New York

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William Forsythe on the concepts and techniques underlying his exhibition at Gagosian Le Bourget in Paris. Courtesy of Gagosian

Newly presented – and programmed – at Gagosian Le Bourget, the pair of robotic arms conducting giant black flags through a 28-minute sequence on constant loop are the main attraction of ‘Choreographic Objects’, Forsythe’s first exhibition with the gallery. Those who are familiar with his impressive body of work conceived for dancers will detect the transfer of gesture and dynamism to these decidedly nonhuman forms. But whereas dance, even when at its most avant-garde is still a familiar construct, the unprecedented nature of this work encourages a steady stream of questions and interpretations.

Over the course of the recent vernissage, one guest compared them to otherworldly sea creatures, while another suggested that the concept itself felt insurgent (this being the opposite of waving a white flag in surrender). At moments, the arching, swooping, arms would appear athletic or balletic only to turn threatening as the flag rippled horizontally, hovering just above the ground. Those who looked away for a few minutes might have missed the movements slowing down gracefully or else thrusting upward in ways no human could perform. Was Forsythe considering Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square as an animated object, or prophesising automated art as a new medium? Ultimately, everyone seemed to arrive at the same conclusion: wow.

The show, which also includes a video of dancers Rauf Yasit (aka RubberLegz) and Riley Watts entangled in their own contortionist Gordian knot, marks Forsythe’s ongoing pursuit of testing alternative ‘writing tools’ for movement. In a sense, his robots might be considered the descendants of Loie Fuller, whose mesmerising Serpentine Dance from 1896 was owing to wooden poles that she swirled from within diaphanous white robes to extend her range of motion. Forsythe enthusiastically acknowledged the parallel – and the competitive edge an industrial robot has over joints and muscles.

‘What you’re watching is something absolutely platonic, because all the geometries in this event are digital – or mechanical via digital. So it’s a digital entity’s idea of horizontality or verticality or circularity or torque,’ he explains in a follow-up conversation. ‘On the other hand, human movement has more complexity because it deviates more.’

Forsythe presented Black Flags for the first time 2014 as a commission by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and that museum hall was considerably more restricted than Gagosian’s vast, curved-ceiling loft transformed by Jean Nouvel in 2012. Here, the industrial nature of both space and subject correspond especially well. But the different dimensions also meant that Forsythe’s programmer, Sven Thöne, spent six months painstakingly redesigning each movement to account for variables in height or air flow.

This would quell any temptation to consider the robots, supplied by the manufacturer Kuka, as artificial intelligence applied to art. After all, their full-time job is on a factory floor, which is where they return after they finish moonlighting here. ‘We pluck them from their industrial tasks and then for a few weeks or a few months, we give them a poetic task and then they disappear,’ mused Forsythe.

Cue the empathy impulse. When suggested to Forsythe that he’s liberated them, even if briefly, from their mundane existence by allowing them this form of artistic expression he replied, ‘They’re also capable of that, you know? I’m making an assumption here, but no one thought of them as poetic instruments of writing.’

The fact that Black Flags is being exhibited in a gallery means it might find a forever home with an institution or collector. As an interesting plot twist, Forsythe, who lives in Vermont, pointed out that the buyer actually acquires the choreography. ‘It’s not like I’m suddenly doing visual art; this is choreographic work. It could be seen as sculpture – sure, why not. But that was not the intention. The intention was to find a site for choreographic writing.’

Still, what results from this writing is visually powerful – and perhaps even more so at a time when issues concerning nationalism and the presence of darker political forces remain ever-present. Forsythe, for the most part, eschews this discussion, offering instead that he settled on black because it was ‘aesthetically, relatively neutral.’

Anyone who can visit this performance live will be distinctly aware of the sound, a push and pull between the fabric flapping and the machines whirring, times two. Forsythe singles out a moment when the left flag drags across the floor to produce a snake-like hissing noise as just one surprise in this unintended music score. ‘It’s like a piano duet because, when making pure choreography like that, there’s no narrative involved. I’m trying to actually erase any kind of associative narrative.’ Which circles back to all the interpretative possibilities. One person’s matador muleta is another’s sting ray.

INFORMATION

‘William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects’ is on view until 22 December. For more information, visit the Gagosian website

ADDRESS

Gagosian Le Bourget
26 Avenue de l’Europe
93350 Le Bourget

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Peter Marino is continually driven to make new and long-lasting marks on the creative world. Starchitect, artist, fashion house favourite, leather-clad luminary and landscape gardener; a few of the many titles Marino has collected over an ongoing 45 year career. His art collection is just as multifaceted, including Andy Warhol paintings, historic bronze sculptures, and one of the world's largest collections of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs.

Another title to add to the list: trend-avoider. 'Trends are for people who want to get noticed. Three months later everyone is yawning,' says Marino, clad hat-to-shoe in the iconoclastic biker-gear he's known for, complete with fingerless gloves bound in the same French calf leather used for his recent pen collaboration with Caran d'Ache. Silver bird-skull rings clink on each finger. 'Maybe it’s old fashioned, but I think the end goal in design should be timelessness. IM Pei achieved it with the East Wing of the National Gallery of Washington. It has no time, no place, no nothing. That’s why it was great when it opened, it's great now, and will always be great.'

His quest for design longevity explains his predilection for bronze – a material that can last 5,000 years. He has worked with it since 2012 on three collections of functional boxes, the latest of which is currently on display at Gagosian gallery's Davies Street location. 'There was a show about the age of bronze here in London about three years ago,' Marino recalls. 'The centrepiece was a Greek statue of a dancer that they found under the ocean from 400 BC. It was essentially 2,414 years old. I was so impressed. What art really lasts the ages? Does anything we do last that long?'

Bronze doesn't just appeal to Marino for its ability to outlive us. 'It's one of those materials that becomes more beautiful the more you touch it. It reacts to the oil in your hands, as opposed to plastic which gets scratched, or wood, that dries up and rots.'

Despite looking deep into the future, Marino's steel-toe capped shoes are firmly planted in the present. Physicality and touch are vital to his practice. He is preoccupied by texture, and the different patinas on his boxes attest to this. Charred, gilded wood gives way to undulating waves of silvered dragon scales, topped by impeccably varnished, blackened surfaces. The doors to one box bares imprint after imprint of Marino's thumb.

To the touch, such intricacies unfold themselves. From afar, the boxes are unshakable, ominous objects; some five foot tall, and just as wide. Marino calls them 'serious'. As with the previous two series (2012 and 2014 respectively), this collection was produced in France's Atelier St. Jacques, part of the Fondation de Coubertin – the French national institution for crafts and manual work. Marino describes his visit there as an 'emotional' experience. 'When I met the guys at the foundry, they were wearing hilariously long leather smocks and gloves so they don't burn. They pour out molten bronze liquid, the smoke pours everywhere – like the fourth of July. The casting is like giving birth to a work of art.'

Marino revels in the theatrical, almost mythological process, which he attributes to a childhood love of legend and storybook fantasy. 'All little boys love mythology,' he says. 'My favourite was always the "Golden Fleece". It is an enduring story. Myths are continually, universally relevant, which is why they last.'

As will these boxes. They are dateless, folkloric, and entirely untrendy. 'So often, people want to be an architect, or an artist, of their time,' says Marino. 'The higher goal, if I may, is to transcend it.'

INFORMATION

’Peter Marino: Fire and Water’ is on view until 11 August. For more information, visit the Gagosian gallery website

ADDRESS

Gagosian
17 - 19 Davies Street
London

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‘It is the first time these works have ever been in conversation together so the show has a very specific conceptual intent in calling them portraits and surrogates,’ says the New York-based artist Taryn Simon, on her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong at the Gagosian.

With Contraband (2010), she presents a selection of images from her photographic archive of 1,075 items confiscated by US customs and postal service officials. Simon lived at the airport for an entire week photographing an eclectic array of items. From counterfeit handbags and dead animals, to intricately wrapped food items and pirate videos, the resulting images are a reflection on how people at the border are defined by their objects.

‘Counterfeit goods were the battlefront of immigration services at that time,’ Simon says. ‘You’d expect more dangerous items but it was an economic battle then.’

The artist is best known for her photography paired with text, as seen in her Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) series. Here, she worked with a botanist to meticulously reproduce the formal floral arrangements showcased at the signing of several important international agreements, accords and treaties.

The monumental photographs, accompanied by text about the treaty signing, are presented in mahogany picture frames that Simon says forms an integral part of the artwork. ‘Some of these flowers convey a certain public ceremony, but the aesthetics are completely different to what the texts are about,’ she explains. ‘For me, it is about that disruption of presumption and judgement and perception.’

The artist’s video self-portrait – made in collaboration with a Russian news programme – is the undisputed highlight of the exhibition. It shows how at the close of a video interview on Russia Prime Time, the artist was asked to sit silently and stare at the two newscasters for several minutes so that the extra footage could be used in the editing process. ‘It is about the ways in which you perform in what, at the end, looks natural but is really very awkward,’ Simon says.

Simon usually works on one project at a time – sometimes for several years carrying out painstaking research – without any idea of what the next project will be. ‘Each project is not a building block but almost a rejection. It is like the person who made that project is dead and there is a new author,’ she offers.

‘In my mind there are radical shifts that come from an exhaustion from the former project. There is a jump to a completely new construction of work.’ Good news indeed.

INFORMATION

‘Taryn Simon: Portraits and Surrogates’ is on view until 5 August. For more information, visit the Gagosian website

7/F Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street
Central
Hong Kong

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At Gagosian Le Bourget on the outskirts of Paris, a mezzanine viewing level encircles the main gallery space so that visitors can look down into an installation. Even if Jean Nouvel, who was responsible for repurposing the former industrial building in 2012, gave deliberate thought to this architectural feature, he still would not have anticipated the installation of the late Walter De Maria’s Truth / Beauty sculptures, which are being presented posthumously as a solo show.

Although the series of works debuted in London earlier this year, also at Gagosian, their arrangement here arguably offers an enhanced reading of his intention. With four polished stainless steel rods allocated to a granite base, each of the 14 sculptures alternate between a chevron or an X formation. Paired together like some sort of binary code, they seem to appear in identical repetition from a distance; closer inspection, however, reveals how the pairs begin with five-sided rods and successively increase by two, so that there are 17 sides to the rods in the final grouping.

People familiar with De Maria’s work will know that he often returned to permutations of polished rods; in fact, Large Rod Series: Circle/Rectangle 11, is other principal work comprising this show, and the installation of 11-sided rods atop an early-nineteenth century Indian Agra carpet (loaned by Galleria Moshe Tabibnia in Milan) projects a striking contrast between the mighty gleaming surfaces and the intricately woven traditional motifs. But where in London, the exhibition was presented as a linear series, the Le Bourget configuration is a counter-clockwise spiral.

When De Maria died in 2013 at the age of 77, he had yet to inscribe the words 'truth' and 'beauty' on opposite sides of each base. According to Gagosian specialist Kara Vander Weg, who worked with him for ten years until the end, he had yet to find the right engraver (Elizabeth Childress, his studio director who now oversees the Walter De Maria Archives, worked with Gagosian to locate an expert in Rhode Island).

This is not the first time that De Maria imbued a work with language; but with these two words, he is inviting viewers to confront a powerful duality that has inspired and challenged philosophers and artists since the dawn of Plato. On this writer’s visit, guests were further encouraged to walk on the chalky white pile carpet that anchors the installation. As noted by Paris art academic Donatien Grau, who was present during the tour, the experience of circulating among the sculptures subsequently raises the possibility of ‘entering truth and beauty.’

But perhaps it's worth considering how the works might have been interpreted had they been left as they were at his death. Would viewers have arrived at these two words on their own without seeing them spelled out over and over again? Do the sculptures register more like a memorial in this context? Vander Weg believes he would have been satisfied with the result. ‘I think it is important to have the words engraved on the sculptures. But I mean, we’ll never know. It’s an interesting thought.’ Indeed, one can't help but think of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn: ‘"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"— that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

INFORMATION

'Truth / Beauty' runs until 11 February 2017. For more information, visit the Gagosian website

ADDRESS

Gagosian Le Bourget
26 Avenue de l'Europe Le Bourget
Paris, 93350

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The azulejo – a kind of painted, tin-glazed ceramic tile – has a rich and diverse history. Since its invention on the Iberian Peninsula seven centuries ago, it has drawn influences from Moorish artisans, the Italian Renaissance, and imported wares from the Netherlands and China. The Portuguese, who consider it a national symbol, introduced it to the distant corners of their empire. It continues to be seen everywhere from magnificent public buildings to humble private abodes.

The dimensions of azulejos have varied with time, but none have been quite as ambitious as the ones by Adriana Varejão, currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery's Rome outpost. These blue and white tiles (or more accurately, tile paintings) measure 1.8 sq m each. With sweeping brush strokes and vivid cracks, they leave a strong impression even in the cavernous gallery.

Born in Rio de Janeiro – a one time capital of the Portuguese empire – Varejão has incorporated tile motifs in her work since 1988. For her, tiles are a means to explore kaleidoscopic identities. Her work is expressive, audacious and much loved. Bernardo Paz, perhaps the greatest art collector in the Southern Hemisphere, created a dedicated pavilion at Brazilian art museum Inhotim (see W*211) to house one of her installations. More recently, she was invited to drape over the aquatic centre for the Rio Summer Olympics with a tile-themed temporary mural.

Varejão produces her tiles by applying generous layers of plaster and oil paint onto canvas. As the paint dries, cracks appear on the surface by accident of nature. These are left unrepaired, perhaps as metaphors for the haphazard nature of cultural collisions. There’s a slightly savage, disquieting side to their beauty.

The tile paintings now on view in Rome are the largest ones Varejão has produced to date. As she recalls, they were inspired by a dialogue between two columns at the Church of San Ignazio. Though these look exactly the same, one is made of marble and the other of wood, painted to resemble marble. Struck by the ‘play on artificiality and representation’, Varejão opted to work with baroque motifs, now found on each painting in the main hall.

‘I based each of these paintings on Portuguese baroque tiles, their images and their object quality,’ she explains. ‘I chose the motifs from my huge archive of tile images, focusing in general on those with more abstract and geometrical qualities.’ Indeed, with a close look and a good dash of imagination, one can see how each painting is a dramatically enlarged close-up of a cherub’s head, an architectural fragment, a rose or a shell.

The show also includes a single installation, Rome Meat Ruin, a tiled wall revealing a cross-section of swirling bloodied meat, which has been rendered in trompe-l'œil (a quintessentially baroque technique). ‘In my work, tiles are not tiles, meat is not meat. It is all about simulation and parody,’ remarks the artist.

Coinciding with the Gagosian show, Varejão has also been invited to present a multi-channel video installation, Transbarroco, at the French Academy in Rome. The piece was shot in the baroque churches of Brazil, backed by sound recordings of Afro-Brazilian drums and readings of key texts on Brazilian identity. It’s a powerful meditation on empire, appropriately on display at the heart of the greatest empire history has ever known.

INFORMATION

’Azulejão’ is on view until until 14 January 2017. For more information, visit the Gagosian Gallery website

ADDRESS

Via Francesco Crispi 16
00187 Rome

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Among the art world royalty in London this week for Frieze Art Fair is American artist Ed Ruscha, for the opening of his exhibition of new works at Gagosian Gallery. Media-shy Ruscha gave a rare audience to Wallpaper* – while having a suit fitted on Savile Row.

Ruscha certainly has style when it comes to words and colours. His paintings put carefully selected phrases and American-isms (like 'oof' and 'honk') into new contexts, carefully designed to help us reconsider their use and impact. His works are famed for their elegance, exactitude – they're bold, confident messages about bold, confident American culture.

But does such an artist have personal style, in the sense of clothing? 'I wouldn’t call myself a clothes hound,' says Ruscha, while he attends his fitting for a very fine bespoke grey suit at Huntsman in London. 'For years I liked second hand clothing,' he confesses.

In fact the artist, always impeccable, looks really quite at home on his first visit to Savile Row. How does it feel? 'It feels like... fitting like a glove,' he says. In an unusual collaboration, the artist has agreed to make a limited-edition range of suits with the historic tailors.

While the tailoring will be left to the professionals, Ruscha has designed the suit lining. 'I like the idea of the concealed secret,' says the artist, indicating the loud message contained in his jacket's silky lining. 'You know that you wear the jacket and clothing like this but then there’s this surprise, almost like you’re flashing'. 

The lining print is taken from one of the artist's seminal works from 1986, Boy Meets Girl, which is currently on show at the Gagosian. When asked if, nearly 30 years on, the painting still felt relevant, he said: 'Boys still meet girls and girls still meet boys.' The painting’s owner, actress Lauren Hutton, will own one of the Ruscha suits, as will the artist's dealer Larry Gagosian. The last suit in the edition of six will be sold at a charity auction in New York later this month.

The artist is typically unforthcoming on his latest series of artworks, which went on show today. The paintings take big, abstract themes – science, the universe, time – and play with language, and the associations and assumptions of scale and order that we make through words. He says, 'I call this show "Extremes and In-betweens". They are exactly that – extremes and in-betweens.'

INFORMATION

Huntsman’s special edition Ed Ruscha suit will be auctioned at the 2016 Alzheimer’s Association Rita Hayworth Gala on 25 October at Cipriani’s in New York. Proceeds from the auction will benefit Alzheimer’s research. To bid, visit the Rita Hayworth Gala website

‘Extremes and In-betweens’ is on view until 17 December. For more information, visit the Gagosian website

Photography: Iona Wolff

ADDRESS

Gagosian
20 Grosvenor Hill
London, W1K 3QD

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Richard Serra’s arresting metal sculptures have always had a way of sucking all the oxygen out of the room. And that’s a good thing. His current New York City show – held at both Gagosian locations downtown – continue the artists’ use of oversized forged and rusted steel to create powerful, Pharaonic forms.

The most visceral piece, sited at the gallery’s 21st location, is NJ-1, 2015, a walk-through installation made up for enormous 4-metre rusted sheets of weatherproof steel. Echoing his many earlier experiential works, the piece is comprised of two semi-attached oblongs, reminiscent of an industrial tanker or ship run aground (familiar Serra motifs). As the visitor walks through the cathedral-like space there’s a definite sensation of dislocation; of exploring a forbidden relic of a massive scale. The artist is constantly forcing you to renegotiate your relationship with the artwork.

Gagosian’s 24th Street location is home to Above Below Betwixt Between, Every Which Way, Silence (for John Cage), Through: three solid steel slab works as well as a drawing. The luminous white gallery at 24th street is anchored by Silence (for John Cage), a minimalist masterwork featuring an 80-ton forged steel slab, which, laid-down horizontally, dominates the space. Primitive and raw, it has an almost overwhelming physical presence.

The other pieces in this series continue the same effect, applying the slabs in various configurations to explore the artist’s ideas about weight, balance and space. Every Which Way is another standout: the work features 16 foot-thick slabs set on a rectangular grid of three heights. Strolling between, one feels as if they are in a kind of funereal procession. The effect is a fitting rejoinder to the other works and NJ-1, 2015’s powerful material presence. 

INFORMATION 

'Richard Serra: Above Below Betwixt Between, Every Which Way, Silence (For John Cage), Through' and 'NJ-1' are both on view until 29 July. For more details, visit the gallery's website

Photography: Christian Mascaro, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery

ADDRESS

Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21 Street and 555 West 24 Street
New York, New York

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At Gagosian Beverly Hills – the powerhouse gallery’s outpost in the land of sunshine, celebrity, and extreme ego-centricism – Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis have dug deep into the shallow Angeleno psyche in a way that only two LA natives can.

The unexpected duo unveiled a set of collaborative paintings last week, the opening timed as a precursor to the Gagosian’s annual star-studded Oscars party. The works take new samples of Ellis’s text – brief narratives on the trials and tribulations of seeking fame – and lay them across quintessential stock images of LA that Israel selected and purchased the licensing to. (The actual labour, meanwhile, was carried about by the Warner Brothers production crew that regularly fabricates Israel’s work.) It’s a millennial interpretation of Los Angeles’ heritage of text-based paintings, in the tradition of both Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari (who, coincidentally, opened a show of new text-based paintings in LA just before).

In the gallery, familiar tropes of the Los Angeles quest for celebrity abound: musings on Instagram, Uber, and Chateau Marmont; images of the Downtown LA skyline, the pastel ocean sunset and palm trees galore. The two together were meant to look like the credits that float over the opening scenes of a film.

‘In Los Angeles, I knew so many people who were ashamed that they were born and not made,’ one reads, over a backdrop of hot-pink terrazzo and the familiar shadow of a palm frond. Another, foregrounded by the silhouettes of palm trees that seemed to be swaying in the wind, reads ‘I’m going to be a very different kind of star’.

Different kind of star is a wholly accurate description for Ellis and Israel. As author and artist, they officially live outside the realm of Hollywood, but the two have risen to fame, in LA-parlance, Hollywood-adjacent. Their respective works have relied heavily on their distillation of LA cliché and iconography, which inextricably revolve around The Industry, but they perpetually blur the fine line between criticism and celebration. Ellis’s 1985 breakout novel, Less Than Zero, surveyed the depraved landscape of privileged LA excess. ‘I’ve thought about the book as a readymade,’ Israel told Ellis in a 2010 Purple magazine interview. ‘Its text seems plucked right out of life.’

INFORMATION

’Alex Israel/Bret Easton Ellis’ is on view until 23 April. For more details, visit the Gagosian’s website

Photography: Jeff McClane. Copyright Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis. Courtesy iStock and Gagosian Gallery 

ADDRESS

Gagosian Beverly Hills
456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills, California

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NYC has some of the best art galleries in the world‚ but with over 1,500 to choose from, the sheer number is overwhelming. Not to worry, we’ve narrowed them down to some of our blue-chip favourites.

David Zwirner
Cologne native David Zwirner looks to bring the world’s best contemporary art to the city. His impressive – and expanding – exhibit of Cuban concretism is certainly in this spirit. In recent years, the gallery has established high profile relationships with the estates of Light and Space icons (and close friends) Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. And the gallery’s representation of Japanese polka dot queen Yayoi Kusama will keep the patrons coming ad infinitum. Multiple locations; www.davidzwirner.com

Lévy Gorvy
Dominique Lévy opened her eponymous NYC gallery in 2013, taking up residence in an old Madison Avenue bank. Fans of art in miniature (us) rejoiced when the gallerist hosted a retrospective of small-scale Alexander Calder sculptures in 2015, and we also took notice of Gerhard Richter’s Pantone-friendly Colour Charts. In 2017, Dominique Lévy partnered with Brett Gorvy to form Lévy Gorvy. It is one of two galleries that exclusively represent the ubiquitous Frank Stella. 909 Madison Avenue; www.levygorvy.com

Friedman Benda
Remember how excited we were about the pre-Memphis Group work of Ettore Sottsass? That glimpse of Sottsass' early pastel oeuvre was the brainchild of Marc Benda and Barry Friedman, who founded Friedman Benda in 2007. The pair doesn't shy away from a little bit of wacky, and it pays off. Casepoint: Paul Cocksedge’s mind-boggling seamless sculptures. 515 West 26th Street; www.friedmanbenda.com

Gagosian
Larry Gagosian’s art empire includes no less than five New York City locations. Currently exhibited artists include Takashi Murakami and Cy Twombly; the gallery also holds close the abstract expressionists of The New York School. Despite a stable that reads like a Who’s Who in pop art, the gallery has made pleasing forays into design: recently showcasing the furniture of the late Austrian sculptor Franz West. Multiple locations; www.gagosian.com

Hauser & Wirth
Founded in Zurich by power couple Iwan and Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser in 1992, the Swiss gallery opened a New York location shortly after. We noted their art scene dominance in 2013, when they put on three concurrent Paul McCarthy exhibits. Multiple locations; www.hauserwirth.com

Judd Foundation
Donald Judd fans rejoiced when his former Soho studio and home‚ previously viewable by appointment only‚ added a public gallery space. And fans also noted how fitting it was that Judd’s son, Flavin Judd, held the first show in tribute to Dan Flavin. Guided tours of the home are still available and encouraged by the Judd Foundation. As the once gritty SohHo neighborhood continues its posh transformation, it’s comforting that at least the art is exactly as Judd left it. 101 Spring Street; www.juddfoundation.org

Lehmann Maupin
The diverse, forward-looking artists of Lehmann Maupin include Brazilian graffiti muralists Os Gêmeos and fashion chronicler Juergen Teller. The gallery has served as a backdrop for Robin Rhode to comment on South African power cuts, and Teresita Fernandez to render Cuba as a malachite landscape. Renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has collaborated with founders David Maupin and Rachel Lehmann to design the gallery’s various homes around the city. Multiple locations; www.lehmannmaupin.com

Luxembourg & Dayan
Alberto Burri is seemingly everywhere lately, including the Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan. Founded in 2009 by Israeli friends Amalia Dayan and Daniella Luxembourg, the gallery has quickly established itself as champion of the unexpected. They previously brought the atomic age kitsch of Italian artist Enrico Baj back to New York for the first time since the 1970s. 64 East 77th Street; www.luxembourgdayan.com

Paul Kasmin
Founded in 1989, Paul Kasmin’s gallery can fairly claim to channel that 1980s New York spirit. Young Kasmin was, after all, brought around the Factory by his art-dealer father. From the word art of Deborah Kass‚ whose OY/YO installation delighted Brooklyn Bridge park-goers to Les Lalanne’s whimsical world, Kasmin boasts a full roster of contemporary thought. Multiple locations; www.paulkasmingallery.com

Salon 94
Salon 94 originated as a Rafael Viñoly-designed extension of founder Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn’s home. It has since expanded to two other locations around the city‚ including another Viñoly construction on Bowery. We featured the gallery’s playful, tropical group show in our September 2015 issue. Multiple locations; www.salon94.com

When artist Taryn Simon came across a photo of Adolf Hitler signing an agreement surrounded by dignitaries, she was struck by a seemingly incongruous floral centerpiece in the middle of the scene. Later, she noticed another flower arrangement in a photo of the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference – a conference held in the United States that established the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Over and over, Simon came across these generic images of men signing world-changing agreements with a floral arrangement nearby.

Combining this motif with a 19th century horticulture book, Simon crafted her latest exhibition, ‘Paperwork and the Will of Capital’. For it, she recreated 36 flower arrangements used in signings that involve the countries present at Bretton Woods. She worked with a botanist to identify the flowers and imported over 4,000 plants from the world’s largest flower auction in Aalsmeer, The Netherlands. Each of the arrangements is also an 'impossible bouquet', a concept that emerged from 17th-century Dutch still-lifes, in which flowers that could not exist together in real life due to seasonality or distance are painted together as a show of status and wealth.

‘Taryn has the instincts and energies of an investigative reporter,’ says Gagosian gallery director Louise Neri. ‘Her work is the point of departure where the instability of facts and history are revealed.’

The arrangements are presented as 215-cm-by-186-cm prints, with the original table and background distilled into one-third foreground and two-third background blocks of color. Displayed in mahogany frames to emulate boardroom furniture and accompanied by an inset description of the treaty signing, these are Simon’s largest single images to date.

Additionally, the artist created her first sculptures by crafting 12 concrete flower presses for each arrangement that house dried and pressed versions of the flowers used for the photographs, sewn on archival herbarium paper. The sculptures are doubles themselves, in the sense that they can bedisplayed as an open book or in the closed, 'pressed' version.

They also include 12 additional photographs of the arrangements Simon created before selecting the larger photographs, along with descriptions of the treaties and their contexts. Her intentions here refer to the fact that we ultimately don't know which versions of these agreements will actually last – the physical flowers, the photographs, the treaties or even the English language itself.

INFORMATION

‘Paperwork and the Will of Capital’ is on view until 26 March. For more details, visit that Gagosian’s website

All images © Taryn Simon, courtesy of Taryn Simon and Gagosian Gallery

ADDRESS

Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

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The preview of the 12th edition of the annual Zona Maco contemporary art fair kicked off yesterday at Mexico City's Centro Banamex convention centre with a host of eye-raising newcomers like Gagosian Gallery and Venus Over Manhattan (which made its debut with an elegant curation of Calder mobiles and stabiles); while heavy hitters like David Zwirner and London's Lisson Gallery are coming back for more after recent debuts.

While the hometown galleries seemed to offer more provocatively curated offerings – with internationals playing their hits – one theme seemed to tie everyone together: transparency and reflection, and not just the overabundance of Anish Kapoor concave and convex mirrors. You couldn't seem to walk down an aisle without spotting works in glass, mirror, or both in every other booth. Jose Dávila got the ball rolling with his glass pane, mirrored glass sphere, and ratchet strap sculpture, Por definir, at Galeria OMR's top notch booth, which also had Squaring the Circle, a hanging, flocked aluminum sculpture (backed by a mirror) from the London-based collective Troika, which morphed between a square, circle and suspended line drawing depending on your viewing perspective.

Peter Zimmermann showed a multi-hued resin pour on canvas at Galeria Filomena Soares' booth just down the way from Tom Burr's glassy polished and printed stainless steel cubes – respectively grip eight, grip nine, and grip ten – at Bortolami Gallery. Josephine Meckseper's 2014 mixed media vitrine, The Story of Mankind, in Timothy Taylor's booth seemed demure around the corner from the grand-standing pyramid of infinity mirror drum kits by Iván Navarro at Paul Kasmin Gallery or Daniel Buren's glitzy MDF, auto paint, and mirrored wall installation at Galería Hilario Galguera. 

'When the reflections approach slickness I'm not so sure about the work,' says Jose Kuri, of Kurimanzutto, which showed a sculpture by Fernando Ortega hewn from a piece of found glass (fitted with five fluttering feathers from birds that fly around the artist's garden), which he likes 'because the glass is freestanding and it's about a humble equilibrium'. He was also a fan of the pink and yellow coloured mirrors by Michelangelo Pistoletto, a master of the reflective medium, at Galleria Continua. 

'Everyone seems to love selfies right now, and mirrors are always neat and now the art world wants to be neat,' says Laura Resendiz of Mexico City's Anonymous Gallery, which had a playful multi-level DIY booth in the Humberto Moro-curated 'New Proposals' section. The yellow booth was designed by Puerto Rican artist Radames 'Juni' Figueroa, who showed his soccer ball vases and paintings. Later in the week LA artist Alex Becerra will add some drawings and the booth will play host to a rock concert and an experimental dance troupe. 'We had a solo show with Pryce Lee that was all circle mirrors, but they all had bullets in the middle,' Resendiz says.

Another homegrown approach to this trend was the Zona Maco Sur booth of Chicago's Carrie Secrist Gallery, where Brooklyn-based artist Dannielle Tegeder sourced a bunch of local glass (and some yellow Japanese radiation glass) which she cut and sandblasted for her site-specific installation that responded to the architecture of the city, fair, and booth. 'A lot of her installations are made of wood,' says gallery director Britton Bertran. 'But she just responded to the glass down here and brought some stained glass pieces from a previous installation in Chicago.'

A more subtle take on reflection was in the Sur booth of ltd los angeles, where Mexican artist Debora Delmar Corp. ('incorporated' because her work focuses on commercialism) presented a series of plaster casts of fake Hermès Birkin bags (dyed with powdered fruit juice) that were displayed atop plush robes and surrounded by juice-powdered dust sheets that she turned into canvases and wrapped in plastic. 

'Most people can't afford Berkin bags and most people can't afford art, so I wanted to play with this idea of shininess and reflection,' says Delmar, who told a story about a well-heeled woman she'd seen at Maco a couple years ago who was commenting that she had to look at herself closer when she caught her reflection, while looking at Jill Magid's rearview mirror sculptures, which referenced violence and fatality. Those darker themes didn't deter the self-gazing collector, notes Delmard, adding, 'She bought them.'

INFORMATION

Zona Maco is on view until 7 February. For more information, visit Zona Maco's website

ADDRESS

Zona Maco
Centro Banamex,
Av. Conscripto #311,
Col. Lomas de Sotelo
Mexico City. CP. 1120

52.555 280 6073

It’s been five years since Gregory Crewdson last exhibited a new body of work. Following a period of turmoil in his personal life and the collapse of his marriage, the American photographer abandoned the clamour of New York, moving into a former Methodist church in rural Massachusetts.

There, Crewdson withdrew both personally and professionally. ‘I was shut down in many ways during that time, and in fact didn’t produce work for at least two years,’ he says. Instead, he sought solace in the hinterlands, going on long hikes and open water swims; in winter, he turned to cross-country skiing through woodland trails.

‘I found that spending time in the wilderness was comforting, and Becket was a familiar place for me,’ explains the artist. ‘I was doing all of this solely as a way of keeping my head clear, and to find a sense of refuge.’ And it was there in the rural town of Becket that Crewdson, the artist, would be reborn.

Launched last week at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, ‘Cathedral of the Pines’ is a new series comprising 31 digital pigments captured during Crewdson’s sojourn in Becket. It was a homecoming of sorts for the artist, whose family had a country home in the area, and where he spent a great deal of time as a child.

Crewdson recalls the moment of his epiphany, skiing on a trail miles from anything: ‘The light, the cold air, the smell of pine triggered a sense memory, and I had this feeling of revelation. I knew I wanted to make pictures that explored that simultaneous sense of isolation and connection that you feel in nature.’ As it happens, he was on a trail known as the Cathedral of the Pines. He knew immediately that this was going to be the name of his next body of work.

The series bears all the hallmarks of Crewdson’s inimitable style – immaculately composed mise-en-scène, cinematic lighting and somber figures caught in forlorn trances in small-town America – but there’s an undoubted shift in the visual narrative. Crewdson’s staged twilight seems to give way to something more uninhibited here.

‘“Cathedral of the Pines”, in many ways, represents a turning point for me. There’s a sense of return on many levels, but specifically to using colour and light as a way of telling a story and creating a mood,’ says Crewdson. ‘I think the pictures also come out of a place of personal reconnection.’

To wit, the artist worked with a smaller crew than usual (up to 60 people would normally assist on a Crewdson production) and also cast friends and family in his pictures – a new experience for him.

Becket’s forests – and ultimately Crewdson’s salvation – are brought to the fore in this series, recalling 19th century American and European rural canvases. In Mother and Daughter, 2014, a smattering of snow sweeps in through a balacony door left ajar, while the woodland engulfs Crewdson’s subjects in The Haircut, 2014. Even in a shot of a timber-clad interior with narrow windows, the reference to nature is made through the paintings that hang along the walls.

‘Everything about the final work is very intimate, quiet in tone, subtle,’ Crewdson muses, ‘and hopefully evocative of something very personal and very private.’

Following a period of turmoil in his personal life and the collapse of his marriage, Crewsdon moved into a former Methodist church in rural Massachusetts – a shift that saw his practice reborn. 

Crewdson recalls the moment of epiphany while skiing: ‘I knew I wanted to make pictures that explored that simultaneous sense of isolation and connection that you feel in nature.’

The series bears all the hallmarks of Crewdson’s inimitable style – immaculately composed mise-en-scène, cinematic lighting and somber figures caught in forlorn trances in small-town America. 

Despite this, there’s an undoubted shift in the visual narrative – Crewdson’s staged twilight seeming to give way to something more uninhibited.

INFORMATION

’Cathedral of the Pines’ is on view until 5 March. For more information, visit the Gagosian Gallery website

ADDRESS

Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21st Street
NY 10011

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Richard Serra's 'Ramble Drawings' – on show at at the Gagosian Gallery in Paris – are neither accompanied by text nor any commentary from their maker. The new series, which follows a similar show last fall in New York, presents a meditation of sorts on Kazimir Malevich’s black square; drawing after drawing in black lithographic crayon fills each plane of paper with varying degrees of intensity, tonal vibration and texture.

In some, the treatment appears coarse and linear; in others, the markings are randomised and soft like tweed. Some approach total blackness, while others marked up with powdered pastel resemble splotched stone. Perhaps you’re looking at television static, or possibly a slab of slate. To look at the grid of 30 smaller works in the upstairs gallery (sold as one piece) is to realise how the repetition of an idea does not equal repetition of results.

In a way, they feel grimly impressionist, as if all those vibrant hues employed to capture a sunset more than a century ago have been newly de-saturated and stripped of color to reflect our times. But the works are also an abstract expression corresponding to Serra’s fluctuating moods and impulses. Visitors are left to consider open-ended interpretations; and perhaps the only conclusion to accept is that the compositions are unreadable.

It is, however, interesting to note that there is no hierarchy to the works, and all harmonise completely together. Which, for those in the market to buy, poses a legitimate challenge: how to decide which one, or perhaps how many? A gallery representative suggested that people tend to go by instinct. So take cue from their title and wander around them a few times. Maybe one will hum a little louder.

INFORMATION

'Richard Serra: Ramble Drawings' is on view until 2 April. For more information, visit the Gagosian Gallery's website

ADDRESS

Gagosian Gallery Paris
4 Rue de Ponthieu
75008 Paris

When New York City's New Museum staged its 2013 retrospective for the late sculptor Chris Burden, some of the most arresting pieces of work were several intricately realised bridge constructions that debuted during the show. While those structures spanned the width of the room, a selection of Burden’s small-scale bridges is currently being displayed at the Gagosian’s Park Avenue and 75th Street space.

Of course, Burden’s fascination with bridges didn’t just materialise in 2013. Back in 1997, the sculptor was captivated by a drawing of an unrealised bridge from the 19th century and created his piece, The 1/4 Ton Bridge, from vintage Meccano and Erector sets.

‘As a sculptor, I’m interested in architecture and I’ve made artworks that are literally architectural,’ Burden has said. ‘What I like about bridges as a kicker is that a bridge’s function is extremely pure and clear. Yet, if you look through the history of bridges, the solutions are infinite.’

Rather than being merely aesthetic constructions, Burden’s bridges are accurate down to a tee. In addition to understanding the mechanics of proportion and weight – which he’s also demonstrated in other kinetic, transport themed works – Burden also commissioned stainless steel replicas of the 'Erector Mysto Type I' set to ensure that his bridges would resist rust and corrosion. These improved components appear in Indo-China Bridge, 2002; Tower of London Bridge, 2003; and Victoria Falls Bridge, 2003. The full extent of Burden’s imagination is best captured in Tyne Bridge Kit, 2004 – a wooden cabinet made specifically for a 31ft model of the titular bridge, which involves 20,000 pieces, and includes tools and instructions (thankfully).

The Gagosian’s love for Burden doesn’t stop there. At its Madison Avenue location, the gallery is exhibiting one of Burden’s last works, Buddha's Fingers, 2014–15. Taking cues from Urban Light, 2008, which permanently holds court at LACMA’s entrance and catapulted Burden into the public consciousness, a forest of 32 cast-iron antique street lamps are set in a honeycomb formation. 

INFORMATION

‘Bridges’ and ‘Buddha’s Fingers’ are on view at Gagosian’s uptown locations until 20 February. For more details, please visit the Gagosian’s website

Photography: ©Chris Burden. Courtesy of the Chris Burden Estate and Gagosian Gallery

‘This is a huge departure, quite a scary one, actually,’ says Edmund de Waal of ‘Ten thousand things’, his upcoming solo show at Gagosian Beverly Hills. For a world-renowned ceramicist who threw his first pot at the age of five – and who’s since installed his elegant and haunting ceramic-filled vitrines beneath the pavement outside the University of Cambridge and atop the cupola of the Victoria & Albert Museum — that’s saying quite a lot. ‘It’s come out of a lengthy period of thinking about architecture and music and all kinds of other things, so it’s a really big show for me.’

For those who are familiar with de Waal’s work — mainly white, black, sometimes colored vitrines, carefully staged with Japanese-influenced pots, plates or cups that are created in an assembly-line-like fashion at his white-walled, gallery-sized South London studio — the format might not, at first glance, seem particularly groundbreaking. Even his use of black porcelain, which he showed at his 2013 debut with Gagosian in New York, and again at his 2010 solo at London’s Alan Cristea Gallery, isn’t entirely novel.

But over the last two and a half years, the artist has been experimenting with black glazes in an attempt to find ‘new shadows, gaps and spaces in his work’, he says. ‘And what those can do at scale.’

The decision to explore this darker terrain — in the form of hundreds of black vessels made with copper-and-tin-flecked glazes in dialogue with hunks of raw materials (from Cor-Ten steel and gold, to lead and plaster) all framed within various black aluminum-and-glass vitrines — began as a response to the revolutionary scores of John Cage, particularly his mid-century masterpiece The ten thousand things.

For de Waal, Cage’s brief residency in the early 1930’s at Rudolph Schindler’s King’s Road House in West Hollywood (now home to the MAK Center for Art and Architecture) was the starting point. ‘I’ve had a photograph of the Schindler on my wall for about 20 years,’ says de Waal, who hasn’t actually been back to the house for over a decade. Still, this meeting of modernist mavericks, argues de Waal, provided a mind-clearing platform that allowed Cage’s more iconic sonic experimentations to take shape.

‘The Schindler House with its concrete and timber coming together in unexpected ways and Cage being so decidedly radical about not letting anything lie – to free yourself from what you know, they seem to be different things. But they’re actually very similar in that they’re both experimenting in public. That’s really what this is about,’ says De Waal, who is making, glazing and placing his works in a looser, more intuitive fashion for his own public experiment in Beverly Hills. ‘I just picked up these blocks of Cor-Ten steel and thumped them down very rhythmically, in a very random way. It’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to doing a musical score.’

In years past, De Waal admitted his installations had a borderline over-determinacy about them, but claims his newfound freedom is ‘a lot more fun,’ he says. ‘Of course it doesn’t always work. In all proper experiments, some things go wrong.’

The exhibition might be seen as a through-the-looking-glass moment for De Waal’s obsession with vitrines. ‘The vitrine is a safe container, where you prevent the diaspora and when I started using vitrines that was the resonant stuff,’ says De Waal. ‘Now it’s much, much more sculptural. It’s an elbows-out kind of relationship between what’s going on with structure and objects.’

At Gagosian, de Waal is revolting against those safety barriers and virtually everything he was chasing in The White Road: Journey Into an Obsession, his new ‘history of brokenness and shards’ that documents recent pilgrimages to Jingdezhen, China, Dresden, Germany and Cornwall, England, the high holy places of porcelain, which has defined his delicate practice for the past three decades.

‘I was living in this obsessive space in my head about white and reading Moby Dick and I was really, really interested in trying to get as close to the first moment of porcelain in the west in Meissen, where they tried for 15 years to make white porcelain and they ended up making black porcelain because they couldn’t figure it out.

'It struck me as this extraordinary, deep metaphor — you’re trying to get to white but you have to go through black,' says De Waal, explaining, 'I don’t do random exhibitions. It’s about a body of work for specific place, a time of year, a quality of light. This exhibition is for LA, a city of exiles and wannabes and experimentation and Schindler and Cage. It seemed to be a very good conjunction to give me a kick to do what I wanted to do.'

INFORMATION

’Ten thousand things’ is on view until 18 February. For more information, visit the Gagosian’s website

Photography: Mike Bruce. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery

ADDRESS

Gagosian Beverly Hills
456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills, California

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Tucked into a hidden corner of Mayfair just north of Berkeley Square, the soon-to-be-opened Gagosian on Grosvenor Hill is the international gallery’s third outpost in London and its most ambitious to date. Located in a 1960s building that was formerly home to the head offices of Savills estate agents, the 18,000 sq ft space is the result of two years of design and construction work. ‘Together [with Gagosian] we’ve been looking for a space in Mayfair for about ten years,’ says Adam Caruso of Caruso St John, the architects behind the design of all three of the gallery’s London locations as well as its spaces in Hong Kong, Paris and Rome. ‘We’ve done about 16 feasibility studies for galleries in Mayfair, some quite detailed. Finally this building came onto the radar and thank goodness it happened.’

Having recently completed the redevelopment at Tate Britain as well as Damien Hirst’s soon-to-be-unveiled gallery in Vauxhall, the practice are in demand when it comes to gallery design, and for Grosvenor Hill they have a few new tricks up their sleeve. 

Clad with handmade light grey Roman bricks, which are elongated and flatter than standard stock, the building is punctuated by a series of towering double-height steel-framed windows. The original 1960s structure's podium exterior remodelling was done by a separate architecture practice - TateHindle. The entrance is located on the west side, where a floor has been removed to create a sequence of four double height gallery spaces including two main galleries, each measuring 18m long and 4.8m high. 

On the east side – off-limits on the day we visited – director’s offices and two private viewing rooms are located on the first floor level. These spaces are designed to accommodate the bulk of the Gagosian’s London operations, which are currently housed in the gallery’s Britannia Street location in Kings Cross.

In the gallery spaces, Caruso St John teamed up with lighting designers at Arup to install a lighting scheme harnessing state-of-the-art LED technology. Installed in the ceiling, a set of laylight panels are programmed to use two colour temperatures – a cool array and a warm array – and can be set at anything from 50 to over 1000 lux. In addition, a set of sensors installed on the outside of the building are able to read and then replicate the external lighting conditions inside the gallery. 

‘We do a lot of historic shows that require incredibly low light levels, so the fact that natural light can be created without natural light is great,’ says Gagosian director Stefan Ratibor. Fellow director Gary Waterston adds, ‘Ultimately it was about being able to light the walls perfectly, without us having to add more and more to the ceiling.’

Aside from the impressive proportions and cutting-edge lighting design, one of the gallery’s most distinctive features is the fumed end-grain oak block flooring that is used throughout the lower level. Eschewing the concrete flooring found in many of the Gagosian’s other outposts, the engineered timber floor offers a solid but more refined aesthetic. ‘This is, in the best sense, a West End gallery,’ says Caruso, referring to the space’s more delicate nature. Although all of the internal walls can be moved, and entrances can be made wider to accommodate larger pieces, there are restrictions: ‘You couldn’t do a Serra show like we did in Brittania Street, you’d have to prop the floor,’ Caruso continues. 'You also couldn’t get the access. Those shows require road closures from the M25 on Sundays. That difficulty is part of the work.’

Scheduled to open on the 10 October, a week before the 13th edition of Frieze Art Fair, Waterston believes that, after a number of years that saw galleries moving out of the centre of London, Mayfair is re-establishing itself as the centre of the art world: ‘If you have someone who’s time poor and coming into London, they are doing most of their business in Mayfair,’ he reflects. ‘So as a result we have to make it as easy as possible for them to see our artists’ work. We have to up our game, pay higher rents and be in the middle of it.’

ADDRESS

Gagosian Gallery
20 Grosvenor Hill
London, W1K 3QD

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The late Austrian sculptor, designer and installation artist Franz West, who was honoured with the Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement back in 2011, continues to be feted internationally for his pioneering oeuvre, reflecting and encompassing participation, play and design.

This month, New York's Gagosian Gallery outpost is celebrating his distinctive design with new editions of his works, produced by Franz West Privatstiftung in West’s Vienna studio by his staff. But this range of the designer's furniture, initially launched from 1992–2011, is rooted in more than mere functionality.

‘Transcending the entrenched status of art as object for pure contemplation, West designed these furniture works as constituents of sculpture that are as elemental as they are convivial,’ says Ealan Wingate, the Gagosian's New York director.

The works on view include sofas upholstered in raw linen and tables with steel legs encased in cardboard tubing. Nor is West’s work solely marked by spare lines and beige upholstery; there’s a metal coat rack of sinuous pink squiggles and chairs punched up with bold palettes.

High profile museums like Centre Georges Pompidou and the MAXXI in Rome hold examples of West’s design in their permanent collections. ‘True to West's vision, the works have drawn a devoted following of collectors,’ says Wingate. Private collectors include London auctioneer Simon de Pury and Upper East Side/London dealer Dominique Levy, along with Andrew Hall – founder of the Hall Art Foundation in Reading, Vermont – and artist Mary Heilmann. ‘Fifteen years ago, Franz and I showed in the same Vienna gallery and I was struck then by his domestic design sensibility while crossing over into serious sculpture,’ says Heilmann. Today, West’s pronounced aesthetic and philosophy remain paramount, embraced by an increasingly wide audience.

High profile museums like Centre Georges Pompidou and the MAXXI in Rome hold examples of West’s design in their permanent collections. ‘True to West’s vision, the works have drawn a devoted following of collectors,’ says Ealan Wingate, the Gagosian’s New York director. 

The works on view include sofas (and this chaise lounge) upholstered in raw linen and tables with steel legs encased in cardboard tubing.

‘Transcending the entrenched status of art as object for pure contemplation, West designed these furniture works as constituents of sculpture that are as elemental as they are convivial,’ says Wingate. 

INFORMATION

Photography by Marina Faust, courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Copyright Franz West Privatstiftung. ‘Franz West: Möbelskulpturen/Furniture Works’ is on view until 7 November

ADDRESS

Gagosian Gallery
976 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075

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The sleeping security guard is already the star of this year's edition of Frieze. He sits, we assume he sits there still, head propped against a wall of the Hauser & Wirth stand, snoozing oblivious, tweeted and Instagrammed, gone social, possibly even viral. It doesn't look like a happy sleep, or a tormented sleep or an active sleep, just a standard preparation for death sleep. Frieze can get you that way.

Visitors look at the tagged-up security guide and smile or think about a prod. Is he art or just a lazy sentinel? He is art of course - phew, no unpleasantness required then - actually Sleeping Guard by Christoph Büchel. And he is part of what is easily the most interesting and successfully conceived stand at the fair.

Curated by Mark Wallinger, a new signing for Hauser & Wirth, the stand is cluttered and domestic. Titled 'A Study in Red and Green', it is a take on Sigmund Freud's study in Hampstead and greater than the sum of its Louise Bourgeois, Martin Creed, Paul McCarthy, Roni Horn, Subodh Gupta (amongst others) parts. It feels nocturnal, like the seemingly random-but-not-stops of a restless unconscious. Perhaps these are the security guard's dreams. Who knows what he has seen. There are other interesting things to look at, disorientating and random in their own way, but nothing as arresting.

Carsten Höller has created a kindergarten at the Gagosian stand. Which is nice. Cory Arcangel's carpet on the Lisson Gallery stand is a success. The gallery goes big on Arcangel's video pieces and Ryan Gander's concrete sculptures and to good effect. Thomas Dane's stand is well composed and I liked the paintings by Ella Kruglyanskaya, a New York-based Latvian, at the Gavin Brown stand which looked French and flighty and funny though no one else seemed much taken.

There is a strong showing from Brazilian galleries this year, including Galeria Luisa Strina from Sao Paulo and the excellent A Gentil Carioca from Rio. They are a welcome addition to the mix, even if most of the action is around the cluster of blue chips during the press and VIP opening (how 'V' is always hard to know. The Frieze caste system remains impenetrable.)

The experience (more of an 'assault' in the past) is also generally more civilised this year. BarberOsgerby's Universal Design Studio has designed the tent and the aisles are wide and there is more air in the air but still too few places to sit down and get your bearings. The VIPs - men in art scarves and art spectacles, tottering ladies in leopard print skirts with taut, tortured looking faces - are as worth watching as ever. And listening too.

The more abundant air is kissed, dinner arrangements made (and probably forgotten) before they wobble or glide back to their idling luxury sedans which will spend much of the rest of the day snarled and stuttering amongst other luxury sedans. While our security guard, happily or unhappily, remains oblivious.

ADDRESS

Frieze London
Regent’s Park
London NW1 4PJ

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As Hong Kong presents ART HK 12, its fifth international art fair – now under the Art Basel franchise and expected to draw even more visitors than the 63,500 last year – it is also celebrating its transformation into the de facto art capital of Asia. Thanks to an unprecedented boom in China’s art market and a growing demand for Western art (Christie’s Hong Kong sold £225 million in a week last autumn), several influential international galleries have opened permanent spaces timed to coincide with this year’s fair.

Explore the galleries making their mark on Hong Kong's art scene

‘There is palpable excitement about how the art scene is developing,’ says ART HK director Magnus Renfrew, who believes the combination of location, language, reputation and international culture has contributed to its status as an art hub.

Just a decade ago, the city was relatively provincial with a weak art infrastructure compared to traditional art centres. But recently a handful of galleries have introduced a rare pedigree of artists to the city. Ben Brown Fine Arts, which recently extended its Andre Fu-designed space, last week launched an exhibition by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti; the White Cube gallery, which staged a successful opening in March, unveiled Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom’. Meanwhile, the Gagosian Gallery has spent its inaugural year treating Hong Kong to Damien Hirst and, this month, Andreas Gursky’s first Asian exhibition.

The newest clutch of blue-chip galleries will likely up the ante still further. Parisian dealer Emmanuel Perrotin opens his vast 17th floor Galerie Perrotin with ‘The Nature of Need’, exhibiting the work of American neo-pop artist KAWS. ‘It is the perfect time to be opening in Hong Kong,’ says Perrotin. ‘The market is very exciting and we have a space that allows us to show exactly what we want.’ Striking interiors by Andre Fu make full use of the harbour views and natural light. ‘For me, art spaces are about creating experiences, so we flipped the circulation to the window side, creating free movement along the full-height windows,’ says Fu. ‘It is a quite subtle but effective use of the space.’

Spurred on by exponential growth in Asia, Sotheby’s is opening a sleek 1,400sq m gallery in Pacific Place, designed by local architects Richards Basmajian, and taken the entire fifth floor as an auction and lecture hall. The spaces were micro-designed with flexibility in mind. ‘Even the windows have panels to hang pictures,’ says David Richards. ‘With Sotheby’s the art works vary dramatically from traditional to cutting-edge modern, so the space had to be simple by necessity but details such as flexible lighting were critical,’ The gallery opens on the 19th May with ‘Hong Kong Blooms In My Mind’ by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, as well as an exhibit of French landscape painting from the19th and 20th centuries.

Also this week, Pearl Lam’s eponymous gallery presents its inaugural exhibition of Chinese abstract art, re-examined by contemporary-art scholar Gao Minglu and Paul Moorhouse, curator of 20th-century portraits at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Says Lam: ‘Contemporary abstract art is usually regarded by the West as second hand and derivative, but the Chinese see it differently. This exhibition will show a different perspective.’ The 350sq m new gallery in the Grade II-listed Pedder Building has temporary walls to create bespoke spaces for each piece. ‘The next exhibition will change completely. Windows will appear,’ says Lam, who was drawn to the building’s high ceilings and its paradox: ‘Outside is old but inside is new.’

Simon Lee Gallery opens this week in the same building with an exhibition of new works by American artist Sherrie Levine . Designed by Belgium-based Bataille Ibens, the gallery carries over the aesthetic of the Lee’s London gallery and acts as a project space. ‘We are adopting a different model to the conventional gallery,’ says Asia director Katherine Schaefer. ‘During the rotations in our space, mediums will range from painting, drawing and sculpture to multimedia installation and film.’

It’s not yet clear what benefit these international players will bring to Hong Kong’s emerging art community. Although they clearly have the potential to reshape the cultural landscape, local gallerists and collectors like Calvin Hui, founder of 3218, a loft-style contemporary gallery in Hong Kong’s Wong Chuk Hang district, have mixed feelings. ‘Many people say Hong Kong is the number one art market and there are a lot of opportunities, but I am still concerned about the size of the market. Tiny galleries will still find it hard to promote art.’