LOS ANGELES — John Currin’s bizarre vignettes of feminine allure are bound to arouse some rather rich and complicated feelings in the viewer, and that is a good thing.
Gagosian Gallery
Posted inNews
Photographer Sends Cease and Desist Letters to Richard Prince and Gagosian
Hyperallergic has learned that a lawyer representing photographer Donald Graham has sent cease and desist letters to Richard Prince and the Gagosian Gallery over the unauthorized use of his photograph “Rastafarian Smoking a Joint, Jamaica.”
Posted inArt
Ephemera, Wives, Paint: Cézanne & Picasso
Masters of painting are occupying major venues in New York this winter. Egon Schiele at the Neue Galerie, Matisse cutouts at MoMA. In addition, the rival Picasso exhibitions at Gagosian and Pace are noteworthy, as is Madame Cézanne at the emblazoned, tarnished Met.
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Richard Prince, Inc.
Richard Prince: New Portraits consists of 37 of the artist’s so-called “Instagram paintings,” each of which, if we’re to believe an anonymous source of the New York Post, are selling for around $100,000. The series, which includes photographs of celebrities such as Kate Moss, Pamela Anderson, Elizabeth Jagger, and Sky Ferreira, feels cheap and underwhelming.
Posted inOpinion
Gagosian Wants You to Shop Small?
The Madison Avenue Gagosian shop has a sign encouraging you to “Shop Small.” Um, what?
Posted inArt
Julian Schnabel’s Formula for Greatness
Since Julian Schnabel first gained attention with his broken plate paintings in the 1980s, he has been predisposed to working on found surfaces – animal skins, velvet, corduroy, sail cloth, tarpaulins, canvas flooring from boxing rings, wallpaper, navigation maps, flags, Kabuki theater backdrops, and photosensitive canvases – which help disguise the fact that he can’t draw in paint and doesn’t really have much feel for paint’s potentiality.
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Cady Noland and Diane Arbus Make a Picnic Out of You
The current show at Gagosian, Portraits of America: Diane Arbus/Cady Noland is in a small gallery reachable only by walking into and through the Gagosian’s Upper East Side gift shop. In order to see the exhibition, to enter the gallery, one must first pass through this physical barrier.
Posted inOpinion
Monuments, Man: Charlie Rose Gets Weird with Richard Serra
For his third-to-last show of 2013, professional interlocutor Charlie Rose brought on lapsed steelworker Richard Serra for a conversation about the artist’s ongoing exhibition of new sculptures at the Gagosian Gallery.
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Mr. Big Stuff: Richard Serra Piles It On
Once in a blue moon a show arrives that excuses the inexcusable — delivering actual aesthetic dividends from the tentacular global reach, bottomless capital and self-aggrandizing, macho scale endemic to the top tiers of the art game. Despite my expectations, that show turns out to be Richard Serra’s extravaganza now filling both of Gagosian’s Chelsea hangars.
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The Cultured and the Creepy: Balthus’s Parting Shots
Balthus: The Last Studies at Gagosian Gallery offers a kind of endnote to Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations, the exhibition a couple of blocks away at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s a denouement that disentwines the cultured from the creepiness in Balthus’ work, leaving only the latter intact.
Posted inArt
Why Jeff Koons Made Michael Jackson White
I still remember the ripples of titillation — occasionally marked by muffled, satisfied guffaws — that spread predictably through the art world when Jeff Koons first exhibited his shiny white and gold porcelain sculpture, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” (1988) at Sonnabend in 1989. The sculpture was part of the series, Banality, which became a definitive step toward garnering the kind of attention Koons has always craved.
Posted inArt
Flowers of Retrenchment: Anselm Kiefer’s Alternate History
Anselm Kiefer has scaled back, way back, from his preposterously overproduced previous solo at Gagosian, but with Kiefer we are always talking about relative degrees of gigantism.