Forget Go-Go Schadenfreude, Bank On Urs

It was the exhibition that everyone seemed so eager to hate: Mega-dealer Larry Gagosian’s Lower East Side “pop-up” space, open through May 23, showcasing sculptures by Urs Fischer inside a former Chase bank on Delancey Street. (Another gallery outpost at 821 Park Avenue is hosting his massive bronze piece, “last supper.”) “How’s Gagmewithaspoon?,” my friend […]

Howard Hodgkin: ‘Once I stop painting, they should start measuring my coffin’

He may be in his 80s and in need of a wheelchair to get about, but Howard Hodgkin still paints with staggering power. Jonathan Jones meets a ‘living master’. Howard Hodgkin sits in a wheelchair in his studio. Light falls through the glass roof on to big boards propped against white-washed brick walls. One by one, […]

Why Gagosian is the Starbucks of the art world – and the saviour

Art dealer Larry Gagosian pushes the best work – Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Richard Wright, Urs Fischer – and fills the gap in our public galleries with real taste and belief.Is the Gagosian empire like the Starbucks of contemporary art? A megalomaniac attempt to corner the art market? It may seem so, but this chain store of […]

Georg Baselitz, Gagosian Gallery/British Museum

Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who likes to bait, provoke and raise hackles, most recently with an interview in Der Spiegel in which he said women artists couldn’t paint (he mentioned the few exceptions, which was generous of him), is enjoying a triple billing in London. His new paintings at the Gagosian Gallery adopt the Abstract […]

Georg Baselitz: Farewell Bill, Gagosian Gallery, review

At the Gagosian Gallery in King’s Cross, one Hans-Georg Bruno Kern, who changed his name to Baselitz after the Saxon village of Deutschbaselitz where he was born in 1938, also presents Farewell Bill, a suite of impressively large and loose self-portraits in honour of the great Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. If Baselitz is […]

Georg Baselitz Action Portraits: A Reflection Of The Artist’s Unconscious

The Britannia Street Gagosian gallery is currently showing the works of Georg Baselitz in Farewell Bill. The new Baselitz paintings are self-portraits that pay reverence to the great artist Willem de Kooning. Baselitz encountered Kooning’s gestural paintings, Woman I  and Woman II, as a student in Germany in 1958. A traditional portrait depicts a realistic […]

Georg Baselitz: ‘Am I supposed to be friendly?’

From his sculpture of a Hitler salute to his comments on women artists, Georg Baselitz has always been a provocative figure. After 50 years exploring the state of Germany, he tells Nicholas Wroe why he turned to America for his new show. In 1958 Georg Baselitz, then a 20-year-old art student recently arrived in West Berlin […]

Culture Art and design Painting The Baselitz stare: lauded German artist opens three shows in London

Gagosian will exhibit his self-portraits, British Museum has his prints and Royal Academy presents woodcuts from his collection. London is having a Georg Baselitz moment, with three exhibitions showing different aspects of the German artist’s work and passions opening within five weeks. Baselitz was in London on Thursday for an exhibition of new self-portraits at […]

How to Spot and Nurture Emerging Talent – Stefania Bortolami

A widely respected tastemaker in the contemporary art scene, the New York dealer Stefania Bortolami cut her teeth with Anthony d’Offay, a legendary London dealer known for his connoisseurial eye in both art—after closing his gallery in 2001, he donated his $140 million collection to the Tate and theNational Galleries of Scotland—and in budding star gallerists. Moving afterwards to Gagosian Gallery, […]

Almost Human: Richard Serra

For those unaware of Serra’s oeuvre, he’s made a name for himself by creating building-sized metal sculptures that often make you feel a little unbalanced when you’re next to them. He makes Art with a capital A, and most of us art folk are taught in our earliest art-school days that his sculptures evoke awe. […]

Rachel Whiteread – Exhibition opens at Gagosian, Geneva

Whiteread’s approach to sculpture is predicated on the translation of negative space into solid form. Casting from everyday objects, or from spaces around or within furniture and architecture, she uses materials such as rubber, dental plaster and resin to record every nuance. The reason my work has affected people over the years is because it […]

Adventures in art-market commodification, enhanced hammer edition

Back in 2012, I wrote a post with the headline “How Larry Gagosian is like Goldman Sachs”. The general idea was that both of them use their relationships and their balance sheet to make money off and/or with their clients. Since then, as Christian Viveros-Fauné says, the art world has become even more coterminous with the art market: “Business […]

Richard Serra – Shifting His Tectonic Plates

Richard Serra at the Gagosian Gallery.  Heavy metal. At the end of December, the PBS host Charlie Rose conducted a curious interview with Richard Serra about his new show in two locations of the Gagosian Gallery in New York, and it quickly became popular on the Internet. The conversation was notable mostly because it reached […]

The Trouble with Mega Galleries

By far the most common topics of discussion and consternation in the art world these days are the four behemoths. Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Pace are the bull elephants of the field, galleries that galumph everywhere all the time, Hoovering up artists and money and monopolizing attention. Jerry Saltz on the Trouble […]

Full circle: the endless attraction of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings

The titles of Damien Hirst‘s spot paintings give them a slightly menacing, as well as a dangerously attractive, air: Cocaine Hydrochloride, Morphine Sulphate, Bovine Albumin, Butulinium Toxin A. Their relentless, insistent brightness feels almost bad for you. No wonder one group of paintings is called Controlled Substances. Yet they have no discernable secrets, and that’s part of the deal. […]

Hirst, Globally Dotting His ‘I’

Thanks to the Gagosian art empire, a ludicrous number of paintings by Damien Hirst are on display right now: 331 of Mr. Hirst’s implacably cheerful “spot” abstractions spread among Gagosian’s 11 galleries in 8 cities on 3 continents. The good news, of course, is that they’re not all in one place. And none involve dead animals, maggots, encrusted diamonds […]