BEVERLY HILLS, CA.- To mark the twentieth anniversary of
Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills on North Camden Drive, founder Larry Gagosian has selected a special exhibition of works by more than thirty artists spanning three generations.
Born in Los Angeles, Gagosian opened his first galleries on Almont Drive and Robertson Boulevard in the early 1980s. Chris Burden and Jean-Michel Basquiat were among the first artists to be exhibited. Drawing on the city's abundance of talented artists, Gagosian was at the forefront of developing a bicoastal model for contemporary art galleriesthe beginning of a global expansion that now numbers fifteen galleries in three continentswhen he moved to New York in 1985 and opened his first gallery there, in collaboration with Leo Castelli.
Los Angeles provided both artists and galleries with an ideal infrastructure for creating and exhibiting diverse bodies of artwork, sometimes on a very large scale, and in 1995 Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills, designed by acclaimed American architect Richard Meier, opened with new sculptures by Frank Stella. A major exhibition in homage to Castellis legendary gallery followed, which brought together works by artists including Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Bruce Nauman. The program continued to evolve with a survey of Basquiats paintings and drawings (1998); Lichtensteins Nudes (1998); Andy Warhols iconic Camouflage Paintings (1999); and Alexander Calders Mobiles (2003), among many other exhibitions.
In 2010, the expansion of the Beverly Hills gallery into the next-door building to create a second light-filled space of equal scaleagain designed by Meierenabled even more ambitious programming, with major exhibitions by Urs Fischer, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons, Giuseppe Penone, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Taryn Simon, among others. The career-spanning survey Avedon: Women (2013) was the first exhibition of Richard Avedon's photography in Los Angeles since 1976.
At Gagosian's much-anticipated Oscar show, an annual fixture in the Los Angeles cultural calendar, the art, film, and celebrity communities rub shoulders prior to the Academy Awards ceremony. To date, these include Cindy Shermans photographic self-portraits (2000); Richard Princes Check Paintings (2005); Andreas Gurskys Ocean photographs (2010); Ed Ruschas Psycho Spaghetti Western still-life landscape paintings (2011); Urs Fischers dramatic and droll sculptural installations (2012); and, most recently, John Currins oil paintings of perverse libertine fantasies (2015).
From Damien Hirsts black-sheep vitrine (2009) to Robert Therriens enigmatic No title (blue bow) (2015) to Nancy Rubinss sculptural graphite Drawing (2015) to other new works by Thomas Houseago, Sterling Ruby, Rudolf Stingel, and some of more than thirty participating artists, the twentieth anniversary exhibition celebrates the gallery's richly diverse international program in the city where it all began.