Gagosian to participate in West Bund Art & Design, Shanghai
Nam June Paik, Ambassador TV, 2005. Single-channel video (color), acrylic and permanent oil marker on monitor in metal vintage television cabinet, 24 1/8 x 16 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches (61.3 x 41.9 x 39.4 cm) © Nam June Paik Estate. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
SHANGHAI.—
Gagosian will participate in West Bund Art & Design with an extensive group presentation. The gallery will exhibit works by Derrick Adams, Maurizio Cattelan, Dan Colen, Urs Fischer, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Gavin, Simon Hantaï, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Oscar Murillo, Albert Oehlen, Nam June Paik, David Reed, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Mary Weatherford, Cameron Welch, Stanley Whitney, and Zeng Fanzhi.
Many of the artists featured in Gagosian’s booth explore aspects of abstraction, expanding the discipline’s formal and referential possibilities through the focused use of innovative or unexpected formats, materials, and processes. The densely layered crimson surface of Oscar Murillo’s painting untitled (catalyst) (2017) hints at conflict and vulnerability, while the text-like graphic marks of Telegram (2013–24) function as an oblique allusion to the flows of people, power, and resources in a globalized world. In an untitled acrylic painting from 1997, Helen Frankenthaler conjures an open, gestural composition in rich colors and bold tonal contrasts that suggests the magnified detail of a natural form. And in Untitled (1983), one of Simon Hantaï’s rarely seen “last studio” works (1982–85), the Hungarian-born French artist derives a field of interlocking shapes from his pliage process of crumpling, painting, and unfolding the canvas before it is stretched.
HORIZON. Soft Steps. (2024) by Sterling Ruby is an outwardly simple arrangement of intensely colored oil and acrylic over collaged cardboard on canvas that, while abstract, refers through its series title to landscape imagery and ideas around impending events. In Homeing II (2021), Stanley Whitney presents a loose grid of vividly colored rectilinear blocks, defining an improvised space through the dynamic grouping of chromatic and spatial harmonies. Albert Oehlen’s canvas Untitled (2023) is distinguished by the artist’s variations on imagined forms and motifs, which he alters to create a pictorial narrative marked by unpredictable twists and turns. And David Reed, in his painting #771 (2023–24), continues to explore strategies associated with gestural abstraction in a manner that evokes filmic techniques, layering expressive brushstrokes over a flat, striped ground to suggest disruptive jump cuts.
In Firecracker (2017), Mary Weatherford complicates an abstract composition of sponged Flashe paint through the addition of a colored neon tube that casts a stark industrial light onto the work’s field of organic gestural marks. Takashi Murakami confronts the viewer with a highly stylized interpretation of the natural world in Panda Parent and Cubs, Yay!! (2024), depicting the titular creatures in a cartoonlike mode that provides him with a mutable symbolic platform for the exploration of pop-cultural fantasy. Yayoi Kusama, for her part, undertakes a more purely abstract venture in INFINITY-NETS [LSCP] (2014), a lilac-tinted entry in the immediately recognizable and long-running Infinity Nets series, which she began after moving to New York in 1958. Covered in a dense concentration of repeated, curved brushstrokes, the canvas also functions for its maker as a form of art therapy, inspired in part by her hallucinatory visions of an unending abyss.
Other artists at West Bund focus on the resonance of materials—whether considered classically “sculptural” or not—and the impact of various physical treatments and interventions on our reading of their qualities and significance. To produce Sunday (2024), part of an installation of the same title that made its exhibition debut at Gagosian New York in April, Maurizio Cattelan “modified” a panel of gold-plated stainless steel by gunfire, leaving its surface riddled with craters to deconstruct the United States’ relationship to the accessibility of deadly weapons. Cameron Welch references ancient Greek history and mythology in Theseus and the Bull (2024), alluding to a world populated by heroes and monsters. And Nam June Paik, in his 2005 “late style” sculpture Ambassador TV, covers a vintage metal television set in gestural strokes of acrylic paint and oil marker, combining these hand-produced adornments with his own video work in a vivid clash of mediums, styles, and ideas.
