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19/1/2009

Two exhibitions

Gagosian Gallery - Madison Ave, New York

Alec Soth

Henri Cartier-Bresson famously said, "The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks." But I don't think the world would have been a better place if these photographers had headed off to a war zone. The question is whether you can be a political photographer while you photograph rocks. My pictures don't have a specific social commentary but I think they have social and political meaning.
--Alec Soth

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present "The Last Days of W.," color photographs taken by Alec Soth between 2000 and 2008.

Although originally conceived without explicit political intent, in retrospect Soth considers this selected body of work, which spans both terms of George W. Bush's presidency, to represent "a panoramic look at a country exhausted by its catastrophic leadership." Soth's earlier series such as "Sleeping by the Mississippi," "NIAGARA," and "Dog Days, Bogotá" – all subjective narratives containing disenfranchised figures and decaying landscapes -- laid the conceptual groundwork for "The Last Days of W." It provides a wry commentary on the adverse effects of the national administration, perhaps best exemplified by an unwittingly ironic remark that Bush made in 2000: "I think we can agree, the past is over."

Following in the humanist tradition established by the great chroniclers of the American experience such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore, Soth captures diverse images of a country disillusioned with, and deceived by, its own identity, from mothers of marines serving in Iraq to teenage mothers in the Louisiana Bayou; from religious propaganda in the American workplace to the mortgage crisis in Stockton, CA. His incisive depiction of contemporary American reality confronts the ideals romanticized in the American Dream with the hastening decline of the American Empire.

A color newspaper of the exhibition, conceived and published by Soth, will be available during the exhibition.

Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, MN. His work has been featured in prominent group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial of American Art (2004), 26th Bienal de São Paulo (2004), the Des Moines Art Center (2005), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2006), and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2008). The survey exhibition, "Alec Soth: The Space Between Us" opened at Jeu de Paume, Paris (2008) and is currently on view at Fotomuseum Winterthur through February 10, 2009. Soth is represented in major public collections, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He lives and works in Minneapolis, MN.

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Warhol from the Sonnabend Collection

Paul Taylor: I saw Ileana [Sonnabend] today and asked her what I should ask you, and she said "I don't know. For Andy everything is equal."
Andy Warhol: She's right.
Paul Taylor: How do you describe that point of view?
Andy Warhol: I don't know. If she said it she's right.
--"The Last Interview," 1987

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings, sculpture and works on paper by Andy Warhol from the collection of the late Ileana Sonnabend. Individual works from the Sonnabend collection have been lent to various museum exhibitions before, but this will be the first exhibition and catalogue exclusively devoted to this outstanding body of work by Warhol.

A renowned gallerist and dedicated art collector, Sonnabend was an early and fervent supporter of Warhol and presented three important exhibitions of his work at her Paris gallery, where she showed the series Death and Disasters (1964), Flowers (1965), and Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1967). During this time she assembled a private collection of seminal works, acquired directly from Warhol's studio at the time of their making. All but three of the works in the Gagosian Gallery exhibition date from the critical years 1962 to 1965.

The exhibition spans Warhol's career, from his earliest paintings of Campbell's soup cans to his later portraits of Mao Tse-tung. Other major series represented include Death and Disaster, Liz, Marilyn, Jackie, Thirteen Most Wanted Men, Brillo Boxes, Flowers and Hammer & Sickle: potent images confronting power, money, and mortality that have become embedded in American visual culture. The exhibition traces Warhol's transition from making hand-painted works to his full adoption of the silkscreen technique in 1962, a move that realized his seamless integration of high art and mass culture.

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Estate of Ileana Sonnabend, Nina Sundell and Antonio Homem. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Picasso scholar John Richardson (who delivered the eulogy at Warhol's funeral) and Brenda Richardson, a leading Warhol scholar who was a close friend of Ileana Sonnabend. The latter essay gives an insightful portrait of the highly regarded dealer and her relationship with Warhol, illuminated by previously unpublished private letters. Included in the catalogue will be facsimile reproductions of the exhibition catalogues published by Galerie Ileana Sonnabend from 1964, 1965, and 1967.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is widely regarded as a defining figure not only of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s but of an entire cultural era. He worked prodigiously across a vast range of media, including painting, photography, print-making, drawing, sculpture, film (sixty experimental films between 1963 and 1968), television (Andy Warhol's TV, 1982 and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes, 1986), publishing (Interview magazine and various books), happenings, and performances. He also endorsed products, appeared in advertisements and made business deals, giving new currency to the philosophical and practical interplay between art as a reflection upon society and art as a product of society.

Opening reception: Tuesday, January 20th, from 6 to 8pm

Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Ave - New York
Tue-Sat 10-6
Free admission

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