http://www.gagosian.com/ Gagosian Gallery News en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss exhibit-E.com http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/251039204/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/britannia-street-2008-04-howard-hodgkin/
April 3 - May 17, 2008
Britannia Street Gallery

Opening reception for the artist: Thursday, April 3rd from 6 to 8pm


"My pictures are finished when the subject comes back. I start out with the subject, and naturally I have to remember first what it looked like, but it would perhaps also contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All that has got to be somehow transmuted, transformed, or made into a physical object, and when that happens, when that's finally been done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back…well, the painting is finished."
--Howard Hodgkin

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Howard Hodgkin, his first show of new work in London since 1999, and his first at the Britannia Street galleries.

Hodgkin's paintings are unmistakable with their assertive, compressed gestures, brush-swept, complex textures, daring, voluptuous palette, and dynamic interchange of light and dark. The presence of a subject, no matter how hermetic, allusive, or fragmentary, is felt to reside in the heart of each. Hodgkin is an artist who embraces spontaneity and directness in equal measure to the processes of reflection, capitulation, and disguise. Sometimes he will labour for years over what looks like a single brush mark produced in an instant. His pictures, with their incorporated frames and painted wooden supports, behave as both objects and images.

In twenty works completed in 2007 and 2008, Hodgkin explores themes of American freedom and erotic intimacy, successfully engineering the intermarriage of private memories with mainstream abstract painting-- "the facts of life as visual art," as the late Robert Rosenblum once described them. The works vary in scale, although there is a marked preference for the epic, whether in intimate, warmly expressive subjects such as Artist and Model and Blushing, or in bold and exhilarating landscapes, such as the huge, incandescent Where Seldom Is Heard a Discouraging Word and the fiercely rendered Home, Home on the Range.

Howard Hodgkin was born in London in 1932 and attended Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham. In 1984, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and in the following year won the Turner Prize. He has exhibited internationally for over four decades and his work is included in major public and private collections all over the world. Major museum surveys include Paintings 1975-1995, organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, that opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and toured to Fort Worth, Düsseldorf, and London; a major retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2006) traveling to Tate Britain (in a considerably expanded version) and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and a survey of paintings of the last decade at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (2007), and traveling to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

A fully illustrated catalogue with an appreciation by Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney, and an essay by novelist, Alan Hollinghurst, will be available.

For further information please contact georgina@gagosian.com or +44 20 7841 9960. ]]> Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:54:53 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/britannia-street-2008-04-howard-hodgkin/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/271587382/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/rome-2008-04-artists-on-view-georg-baselit/
April - June, 2008
Rome Gallery

]]> Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:07:07 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/rome-2008-04-artists-on-view-georg-baselit/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/240166650/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/davies-street-2008-03-marc-newson/
March 4 - May 31, 2008
Davies Street Gallery

"Sometimes I start with the material, sometimes the idea. In this case the materials were the inspiration. Often the context of materials strikes me more than the materials themselves. Context is new, not materials."
--Marc Newson

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of limited edition works by Marc Newson.

Following his acclaimed exhibition in New York, Newson has created three new variations on established themes. As before, each work is conceived and meticulously crafted in a seamless piece of material. Extruded Table 3 is a startling evolution from the preceding Extruded Tables, where the open-ribbon form becomes an unbroken line with no beginning and no end. The dynamics of its streamlined silhouette are further emphasized by the natural grey/white striations of the marble. Low Voronoi Shelf is directly inspired by its more monumental forbear Voronoi Shelf, but reconceived as a useful surface rather than a purely sculptural object. With Carbon Fibre Chair, Newson explores an existing model in terms of a radically different material. In doing so, the highly reflective, "liquid" yet weighty Nickel Chair morphs into its polar opposite, a darkly absorptive, light-weight form.

Newson approaches design as an experimental exercise in extreme structure and advanced technologies, combined with a highly tactile and exacting exploration of materials, processes, and skills. As an industrial designer, his reach is broad and diverse, from concept jets and cars to watches, footwear, luggage, and aircraft interiors. Since the outset of his career, he has also produced beautifully crafted, limited-edition furniture, including the now-iconic Lockheed Lounge (1986). In a world where the distinctions between art and design are becoming increasingly blurred Newson is a trailblazer, having pursued parallel activities in exclusive and mass production for more than twenty years.

Marc Newson was born in Sydney, Australia in 1963 and studied sculpture and jewelry design at Sydney College of the Arts. Parallel to his career as an industrial designer, he has exhibited limited edition works and projects in galleries and public institutions since 1986, including Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris (1995, 2004); Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (2001); the Groninger Museum, Netherlands (2004); and London Design Museum (2004-5). In 2007 Newson had a major exhibition of limited edition works at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Currently he is Creative Director of Qantas Airways. He lives in London, with design studios in London and Paris.

For further information please contact the gallery +44(0) 207 841 9960 or london@gagosian.com. ]]> Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:57:24 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/davies-street-2008-03-marc-newson/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/233960816/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/21st-street-2008-03-piotr-uklaski/
March 27 - May 31, 2008
21st Street Gallery

Opening reception for the artist: Thursday March 27th, from 6 to 8pm


Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce BIAŁO-CZERWONA, an exhibition by Piotr Uklański. This is the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

"Biało-Czerwona" (white-red), referring to Poland's bi-colored flag, is a nationalist slogan as familiar to Poles as "Red, White, and Blue" is to Americans. Uklański's title unites diverse works that engage typical imagery of his native Poland and play on the red/white palette.

Although BIAŁO-CZERWONA is, on one level, authentically Polish, in its use of populist decorative traditions and political symbols alluding to the country's not-so-distant Communist past the exhibition is also a highly stylized performance of identity. In international contexts such as the 2004 Bienal de São Paulo, Uklański has represented Poland; elsewhere he has been labeled a "New York artist" or an "international artist": The art world demands that artists disavow their cultural authenticity one moment and embrace it the next. Uklański recognizes just how powerful this fluidity can be and uses this occasion to embody simultaneously the roles of international artist, Gastarbeiter, new American, and patriotic Pole.

Throughout the exhibition, Uklański utilizes cheap materials to create works that draw on the celebratory ambitions and aggrandizing stagecraft of political events. By fusing such propagandist gestures with vernacular techniques and materials borrowed from popular folk traditions—-exemplified in Szopki Krakowskie (Christmas crèche scenes)and a site-specific mosaic fashioned from ceramic dishware—- he conjures an idealized vision of his homeland. Not only does Uklański exploit the "exotic" quality of these indigenous forms; by reifying their very ordinariness, he elicits beauty from the confines of lo-fi objects. At once monumental and humble, collective and individual, profound and banal, theatrical and genuine, the works in BIAŁO-CZERWONA advance Uklański's ongoing project to create deliberately unstable political, formal, and symbolic meaning
in art.

Piotr Uklański was born in 1968 in Warsaw. Recent solo exhibitions include Summer Love: The First Polish Western, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Piotr Uklański: A Retrospective, at the Wiener Secession, Vienna (2007); and The Joy of Photography at the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg (2007). He currently lives in New York and Warsaw.

A fully illustrated artist's book accompanies this exhibition.

For further information please contact the gallery. ]]> Thu, 01 May 2008 15:02:37 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/21st-street-2008-03-piotr-uklaski/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/237799833/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/beverly-hills-2008-05-gregory-crewdson/
May 3 - June 7, 2008
Beverly Hills Gallery

Opening reception for the artist: Saturday, May 3rd, from 6 to 8 pm


Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs by Gregory Crewdson.

In his latest body of work Crewdson continues to explore his trademarked terrain of small-town disquiet, but in a decidedly restrained mood, with less focus on character and drama and greater emphasis on atmosphere, setting, and the exacting orchestration of light. Retreating from the surrealist theater of confrontation and psychological turmoil that pervaded much of his previous work, he draws the viewer into quieter scenes where isolated or strangely displaced individuals are caught in moments of liminal anticipation. In the interior scenes, framing devices of windows, doorways, and mirrors create layers of separation that allow glimpses of characters immersed in moments of self-reflection; in the exterior scenes, small figures, lost in thought, anchor still and silent vistas.

These haunting pictures were produced in four seasonal cycles of production during 2006-2007, from winter to summer, then winter to summer again. Crewdson's first ever winter scenes depict a small town's bleak, snowy streets and back lots suffused with cold, gray light, while his summer scenes capture the humidity and dark lushness of the forest and residential neighborhoods. In all of the pictures--which are untitled except for an occasional identifying detail or whiff of intrigue--the transitory nature of his chosen locations, which include street corners, front yards, forest clearings, and so on, serves to enhance the pessimism at the core of Crewdson's perception of provincial American life. Formally, his masterful renderings recall the work of American realists such as Edward Hopper and Walker Evans filtered through the damp, saturated colors of American Luminists such as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt.

Gregory Crewdson was born in 1962 and received a BA at SUNY, Purchase and an MFA at Yale University. His photographs are included in numerous museums and public collections around the world. A European retrospective of his work began at Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2005) and traveled to institutions including Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; and the Hasselblad Center, Sweden. Crewdson is a faculty member of the Department of Photography at Yale University and lives in New York City.

A book of the entire series Beneath the Roses, of which this body of work is part, is being published by Harry N. Abrams, New York, to coincide with the exhibition.

For more information please contact the gallery ]]> Sat, 03 May 2008 20:26:18 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/beverly-hills-2008-05-gregory-crewdson/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/231862430/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/madison-avenue-2008-02-prefab/
February 26 - May 17, 2008
Madison Avenue Gallery

Opening reception: Tuesday, February 26th, from 6 to 8 pm


Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce Prefab, an exhibition of works by Richard Artschwager, Alighiero e Boetti, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Rudolf Stingel and Rosemarie Trockel. These conceptually rooted artists have all used industrial, prefabricated, or found materials to achieve a range of new strategies within, and alluding to, painting - demonstrating an attitude towards the abstract sublime that is wholly ambivalent.

While all these wall-based works "behave" as paintings, paradoxically this is achieved through an embrace of assemblagist strategies that abandon illusory representation for a more immediate and readymade reality.

Artschwager's prescient use of Formica and Celotex transformed the classical idea of how a painting could function, renewing emphasis on the intrinsic structure of the work while taking into account the sculptural and structural aspects of a painting's composition. Beginning with one of his seminal Formica paintings, the exhibition charts a trajectory through a myriad of provocative approaches including Boetti's embroideries, Trockel's machine-knitted wool paintings, Kelley's Carpet paintings and Memory Ware Flats, Stingel's Styrofoam and Celotex paintings, Prince's Hoods, and Koons' alluring advertisement from the Luxury and Degradation series. Whether using "soft" household carpet, embroidery, and wool, or "hard" industrial substances such as Styrofoam and automotive components, these artists embrace the eternal dialogue on the nature of abstraction and representation by challenging the traditional use and meaning of painting with a range of substances and textures that invoke associations with daily experience.

For further information, please contact the gallery. ]]> Tue, 06 May 2008 14:00:21 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/madison-avenue-2008-02-prefab/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/260466503/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/24th-street-2008-05-robert-therrien/
May 9 - June 14, 2008
24th Street Gallery

Opening reception for the artist: Friday, May 9th, from 6 to 8pm


Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent sculpture by Robert Therrien.

Therrien is known as an object maker who transforms elements from everyday life into works of art that evoke mythic archetypes. Working both two- and three-dimensionally, he has created a deceptively simple oeuvre that lends itself to psychological interpretation with its evident fascination with childhood, its anxieties and fantasies. While his mentors would seem to include a generation of Pop artists, his work also attests to the impact of Conceptualism as well as folk culture, cartoons, and everyday objects.

In 1993, Therrien made a significant breakthrough that influenced all his ensuing work. No Title (Yellow Table Leg) presented a dramatic shift from the less representational objects that preceded it. This work and the next -- Under the Table (1994), a colossal wooden kitchen table and chair set measuring ten feet by twenty-six feet -- marked a new direction for Therrien. He found that by recreating everyday objects true to their original material and color, but on a greatly enlarged scale, the viewer's relationship to them changed dramatically. In the current exhibition there are four gigantic sculptures, each of which relates to the acts of stacking and folding. No Title (Folding Table and Chairs) comprises four sets of card tables and chairs in authentic 'institutional' tones of beige, brown, and green. The monumentality of these objects invites the viewer to walk around and beneath them, altering perspective and experience to render a formerly familiar situation strange. In No Title (Stacked Plates) and No Title (Pots and Pans II), Therrien similarly remakes everyday domestic accoutrements in new and uncannily large proportions, then assembles them into precariously balanced towers standing almost eight feet tall.

No Title (Red Room) (2000-2007) took Therrien seven years to realize, gathering and arranging 888 red objects inside a custom-made closet with Dutch doors. His meticulous assembly of objects both found and made--red shoes, red laces, red lanterns, red sweaters, red bricks, red canisters, and so on—prompts various associations, for example, from the object/group relationship in Matisse's Red Studio (1911), to the total environment of Cildo Meireles' Red Shift (1967-1984), or Louise Bourgeois' The Red Room—Parents (1994) and The Red Room--Child (1994). In Therrien's work, however, the red items are subsumed into the background, the seemingly disparate objects becoming a unified, monochromatic whole.

Robert Therrien was born in Chicago in 1947. His work has been exhibited throughout the world since the 1970s, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. A major drawing survey is being prepared by the Kunstmuseum Basel, opening in May 2008. Public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Tate Modern, London; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Broad Contemporary Museum at LACMA, Los Angeles. Therrien lives and works in Los Angeles.



The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial monograph co-published by Rizzoli with essays by art historians Norman Bryson and Margit Rowell.

For further information, please contact the gallery. ]]> Tue, 06 May 2008 14:01:11 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/24th-street-2008-05-robert-therrien/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/259871271/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/first-baptist-church-gym-2008-03-anselm-kiefer/
March 30 - May 11, 2008
First Baptist Church Gym Gallery

Gagosian Gallery opening reception: Saturday, March 29th, from 6 to 8 pm

First Baptist Church Gym opening reception: Sunday, March 30th, from 12 to 4 pm


"I don't consider myself a Platonist but I think that the spirit is contained in the material and it is the artist's mission to extract it."
--Anselm Kiefer

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce a major exhibition in two parts by Anselm Kiefer, his first in Los Angeles in more than a decade. The Beverly Hills gallery will present recent paintings, sculptures, and innovative photo-collages and, as a special one-off project at the First Baptist Church Gym in mid-Wilshire, the major installation Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday).

Kiefer gives overt material presence to a vast range of cultural myths and metaphors, from the Old and New Testaments to the Kabbalah, from ancient Roman history to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Célan. He constructs elaborate scenographies that cross the boundaries of art and literature, painting and sculpture by which to engage and understand the complex events of history, the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos, and the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual amid the ongoing destruction of the world. The monumental painting Der Brennende Dornbusch (The Burning Bush), with its dense, sedimentary surface, evokes the exemplary story of salvation in the desolate history of mankind; the pages of massive standing books forged from lead, earth, and silver provide the support for large dried sunflowers that reach towards the sky. In Kiefer's monumental archive of human memory, the gallery and the library, the frame and the book become inseparable, even interchangeable.

The dialog between the intertwined fate of nature and humanity continues in the stirring Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday) installation, which comprises an entire uprooted palm tree and thirty-six "vitrine" paintings containing vertically mounted branches of vegetation (palms, sunflower pods, mangroves) suspended in plaster and earth, phantom specimens in the opened pages of a giant herbiary. In both pagan and Christian iconography, the palm with its sword-like branches, was known as an immortal tree that never actually perished but constantly regenerated, a new sheath of fronds budding from the side of a fallen limb. This traditional Greco-Roman symbol of military triumph was adapted by early Christianity as a sign of Christ's victory over death and came to serve as a universal emblem of martyrdom. Thus Kiefer intends us to register Palm Sunday as a true triumph; understanding that Christ's entry into Jerusalem inaugurated the events leading not only to the Passion but also to the Resurrection.

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany during the last year of World War II. After studying law, he began his art education in Karlsruhe and then Düsseldorf, where he met Joseph Beuys. His work has been shown in and collected by major museums throughout the world. Recent retrospective exhibitions include the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth (2005) (traveling to the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and SF MOMA). In 2007, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presented an extensive survey of recent work and Kiefer was commissioned to create a huge site-specific installation of sculptures and paintings for the inaugural "Monumenta" at the Grand Palais, Paris. Recently, he became the first living artist to create a permanent installation at the Louvre since Georges Braque in 1953. Kiefer lives and works in France.

For more information please contact the gallery.



View Larger Map and Directions ]]> Tue, 06 May 2008 16:14:44 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/first-baptist-church-gym-2008-03-anselm-kiefer/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/286428552/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/beverly-hills-2008-06-joel-morrison/
June 14 - July 18, 2008
Beverly Hills Gallery

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May 30 - July 25, 2008
Britannia Street Gallery

Opening reception for the artist: Friday, May 30th from 6 to 8pm


I think about the full perimeter of the exhibition space as the limits of my consciousness. I position my artwork as points of focus within this space, to navigate you through this arena. I make each piece so distinct that they each press in on themselves. You come across a piece, and then you come across another piece, and then you start developing an understanding of why all these pieces are here, and why they hang or sit together.

I titled this exhibition "Monsters and Stuff" both to create a conceptual backdrop, and to keep it open-ended. From a figurative standpoint, "monsters" represents the abnormal, which is open-ended, whereas "and stuff" states an unresolved conclusion.

We desire resolve.

--Tom Friedman


Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Monsters and Stuff, new work by Tom Friedman. This will be his first solo exhibition at the London gallery.

Empiricist, alchemist, sage, and prankster, Friedman invents startling works of art by taking very ordinary materials - paper, wire, cardboard, plastic cups, pencils, foam core, glitter, Styrofoam - and transforming them using highly specific processes. Whether constructing or deconstructing the object, either on a microscopic or macroscopic level, he meditates on all manner of material existence from dust bunnies to the cosmos, from the idea of nothing to the idea of everything.

In recent years Friedman has expanded his focus to consider both the structure of information and the effects of excessive information on human consciousness. A technical virtuoso, he works on an intricate scale with obsessive attention to detail. His oeuvre reveals five constant elements: the material, the process of altering the material; the form that it takes; its representation; and, finally, the logic that connects these first four elements together, which often appear as diverse ideas and forms. Quirky, humorous and endearing, his mutations and transformations of base material, hovering as they do at the limits of the visible, beg the defining questions of existence itself: What is it? How is it made? Why is it like this? Where did it come from? Why is it here?

In Monsters and Stuff Friedman has constructed a complex landscape of sculptures, small drawings and huge paper collages. Otherworldly creatures morph, float, hang and balance along with bizarre visual phenomena, including glittering, vertigo-inducing images. The general strangeness of the installation is underscored by Friedman's experiments with scale distortion. Overseer, a huge figure standing more than nine feet tall, naked except for giant trainers and socks and complete with pubic and underarm hair, tapers upwards from his large feet to his pin head. Monster Fly is a noirish nightmare where a man runs from a fly twice his size; in Friedman's world, both are less than an inch in height. In Light, a piece of 2x4 timber seems to float in a corner of the room. Among these baffling works are various monsters constructed in paper that stare blankly into space, lean half-dead against the wall, or melt into the floor (Green Demon and Zombie). Friedman's drawing continues to develop in increasingly surreal ways, such as Aluminum Foil Drawing, a portrait of a monster made in foil, to Supreme Being, a large, mirrored scrawl that conveys a message of doom.

Coinciding with the London exhibition, Gagosian Gallery has published a new monograph on Friedman's work, distributed by Yale University Press. A comprehensive survey, it includes essays by philosopher Arthur C. Danto and Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery. A limited edition of the publication will also be available. For further information please contact dgoldak@gagosian.com.

Tom Friedman was born in St Louis, MO in 1965. He lives and works in Leverett, MA. Solo exhibitions of his work include the Museum of Modern Art (1995), the Art Institute of Chicago (1996), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2002), and South London Gallery (2004). A major exhibition of his work toured U.S. museums from 2000 to 2002, including MCA Chicago and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Most recently his work was included in "The Shapes of Space", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and "Art in America: Now", MOCA Shanghai.

For further information please contact london@gagosian.com or +44 20 7841 9960. ]]> Sat, 10 May 2008 13:35:38 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/britannia-street-2008-05-tom-friedman/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/275766015/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/madison-avenue-2008-05-roy-lichtenstein/
May 12 - June 28, 2008
Madison Avenue Gallery

"[The kind of girls I painted were] really made up of black lines and red dots. I see it that abstractly, that it's very hard to fall for one of these creatures, to me, because they're not really reality to me. However, that doesn't mean that I don't have a clichéd ideal, a fantasy ideal, of a woman that I would be interested in. But I think I have in mind what they should look like for other people."
--Roy Lichtenstein

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present "Girls," a seminal group of paintings by Roy Lichtenstein.

In the summer of 1961 Lichtenstein embarked on a series of iconic images of women, taken directly from newspaper clippings and the romance comic books so prevalent in post-war America. The anonymity of the mass-produced, cheap comic book helped him to capture specific impressions of real things, while maintaining the necessary degree of aesthetic distance afforded by what he understood to be the "high restrictive quality of art." He scrutinized his female subjects, editing and re-presenting the crux of their trials and tribulations in paint on canvas on a greatly enlarged scale. The "Girl" paintings, together with the war images (or "Boy" paintings) established him as a major protagonist of the American Pop Art movement. In all of Lichtenstein's art there remains a particular, unmistakably American quality: a knowing and laconic examination of the world that separated him from his Capitalist Realist contemporaries in Europe, who also borrowed from pop cultural sources. His mixing of text and image, and of high and low culture, as well as his strategies involving the appropriated image, continues to be a rich source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artists, from Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, and Raymond Pettibon to John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton.

In 1962, Girl With Ball (1961), a painting of a girl holding a beach ball, taken directly from a New York Times advertisement for a Pocono resort, caught Leo Castelli's eye. He showed it alongside works such as the prescient Masterpiece (1962). Lichtenstein went on to paint various comely women in conditions of distress, like Drowning Girl (1963) and Frightened Girl (1963). Hopeless (1963) shows a teary blonde beneath the caption: "That's the way—it should have begun! But it's hopeless!" and In the Car (1963) depicts a moment of chilly silence between a man and woman. In works such as Forget it! Forget Me (1962) and Kiss V (1964), sexual battles are fought and personal catastrophes played out, the elements of staged, melodramatic love scenes elevated to the realm of fine art. Such images accrue even greater historical importance in terms of contemporary gender stereotypes, the power of media images, and the social dichotomies endemic to modern life.

Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York, where he died in 1997. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. Recent retrospective surveys include the Louisiana Museum, Humelbaek (2003), which travelled to the Hayward Gallery, London, the Reina Sofia, Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2004) and at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2005). A major retrospective is planned to open at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring a conversation between Dorothy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons, a contribution by Richard Prince, and a tribute by Richard Hamilton.

For further information, please contact the gallery. ]]> Sat, 10 May 2008 15:55:26 EST http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/madison-avenue-2008-05-roy-lichtenstein/ http://feeds.gagosian.com/~r/Gagosian_upcoming_and_current_exhibitions/~3/287680954/ http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/beverly-hills-2008-06-denise-de-la-rue/
June 14 - 21, 2008
Beverly Hills Gallery

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