Mining images from mass media, advertising and entertainment since the late 1970s, Richard Prince has redefined the concepts of authorship, ownership, and aura. Applying his understanding of the complex transactions of representation to the making of art, he evolved a unique signature filled with echoes of other signatures yet that is unquestionably his own. An avid collector and perceptive chronicler of American subcultures and vernaculars and their role in the construction of American identity, he has probed the depths of racism, sexism, and psychosis in mainstream humor; the mythical status of cowboys, bikers, customized cars, and celebrities; and most recently, the push–pull allure of pulp fiction and soft porn, producing such unlikely icons as the highly coveted Nurse paintings.

Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone. Prince’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (1993); “Fotos, Schilderijen, Objecten,” Museum Boymans–Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993); Haus der Kunst / Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich (1996); Museum Haus Lange / Museum Haus Esters, Germany (1997); “4×4,” MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Vienna (2000); “Upstate,” MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, Los Angeles (2000); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001, traveled to Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany); “American Dream, Collecting Richard Prince for 27 Years,” Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2004); “Canaries in the Coal Mine,” Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (2006); “The Early Works,” Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2007); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007, traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Serpentine Gallery, London, through 2008); “American Prayer,” Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2011); “Prince/Picasso,” Picasso Museum, Spain (2012); and “It’s a Free Concert,” Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2014). Prince’s works are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Fine Arts Collection, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Prince currently lives and works in New York.

“Gagosian is pleased to present On the Eve of Never Leaving, new drawings and sculptures by Tatiana Trouvé. This is her first exhibition in Los Angeles.

In her large-scale drawings, cast and carved sculptures, and site-specific installations, Trouvé assesses the relationship between memory and material, pitting the ceaseless flow of time against the remarkable endurance of common objects. Combining fragments from both natural and constructed ecosystems, she creates hauntingly familiar realms in which forest, street, studio, and dream coalesce.

“On the Eve of Never Leaving” is a translation of “Na Véspera de Não Partir Nunca,” the title of a poem by Álvaro de Campos, one of the many heteronyms of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). De Campos’s deeply melancholic writings often deal with notions of time and nothingness; they are hymns to the existential void. Trouvé—attuned to the ways in which journeys, physical and spiritual, can circle back on themselves—visually collapses past and future, echoing Pessoa’s linguistic paradoxes in uncanny material form.” per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Confronting insecurities and fears, embracing shortcomings, and contending with the burden of one’s own identity and truth are of paramount importance for becoming more concretely formed. My current studio practice maintains this endeavor: cutting through, digging out, excavating, laying bare wounds—past and present, temporary and permanent—on the surfaces of paper and canvas. 
—Nathaniel Mary Quinn

“Gagosian is pleased to present Hollow and Cut, new paintings and works on paper by Nathaniel Mary Quinn. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.

Quinn’s composite portraits probe the relationship between perception and memory. He rejects the notion of documentary portraiture; instead of depicting physical likeness, he illuminates subconscious aspects of the human psyche, coaxing forth manifestations of innate and repressed emotions.

While Quinn’s portraits might resemble collages, they are actually rendered by hand with oil paint, charcoal, gouache, oil stick, pastels, and gold leaf. He begins with a vision—a vague flash of a face from his past—that he feels viscerally compelled to translate into reality. To do so, he collects images from fashion magazines, newspapers, advertising, and comics, reconceptualizing the snippets as purely aesthetic imagery before methodically redrawing and repainting each one. In an impulse akin to the parlor game cadavre exquis, Quinn covers parts of his own composition with construction paper as he goes, so that no existing section influences the appearance of the next. Only when the work is complete does he remove the paper—revealing a visually disjointed yet psychologically unified portrait or figure whose genesis echoes the extemporaneity of human memory.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

I feel like people tend to look at a painting and think, “OK, one artist paints a painting.” As if the condition remains the same ten years ago, three years ago, and now. But . . . the way I create the work constantly evolves. Especially in the past few years, we’ve been able to use a lot of the 3-D modeling programs, so the way I can grasp and understand forms has drastically changed and evolved. . . . Artistic expression really has to do with technique, and how you can actually realize ideas.
—Takashi Murakami

Gagosian is pleased to present GYATEI², new works by Takashi Murakami, as the 2019 “Oscars show,” a much-anticipated annual fixture on the Los Angeles cultural calendar.

Drawing from traditional Japanese painting, sci-fi, anime, and pop culture, Murakami’s oeuvre comprises paintings, sculptures, films, and a stream of commercial products populated by mutating characters of his own creation. His iconoclastic individualism continues the nonconformist legacy of the Edo Eccentrics, a group of eighteenth-century Japanese artists who constructed a powerfully imaginative world filled with bizarre and emotive imagery.

The exhibition title comes from the Buddhist Hannya Shingyo (Heart Sutra), a popular sutra in Mahayana Buddhism. The incantation is often chanted by Zen groups before or after a meditation. At the conclusion of the sutra, the Avalokiteshvara, a popular and recognizable bodhisattva, turns and recites a mysterious mantra to one of the disciples. The mantra is often roughly translated as “gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, enlightenment, svāhā.” This articulation has been diversely interpreted as a call to “go” attain enlightenment, as the cry of a baby reborn into an eternal true world, and as a curse.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Art is an after-reflection.
—Urs Fischer

Gagosian is pleased to present Images, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Urs Fischer.

In Fischer’s work, images emerge from an odd liminal space between the real and the imagined, between what does, and could, exist. Over the past year, he has been creating paintings digitally, inventing things, rooms, and spaces using color and light. On a screen, as opposed to paper or canvas, Fischer is able to paint with light itself—moving illuminated pixels around, juxtaposing clean lines and gradients, and reflecting on the subtle atmospheric changes across day and night, summer and winter, Los Angeles and New York.

Silkscreened onto aluminum panels, the paintings in this exhibition—vertical compositions broken up into multiple rectangular passages—take on the scale of modern abstraction, yet they all describe imaginary interior and exterior worlds. Windows appear often: one glows behind a gauzy white curtain, looking onto swaying palm trees; another reflects a sunrise or sunset, with a still life on a table barely visible through fingerprints on the glass; and another frames a building across the street, where nine more windows reveal smeared and fragmented California views. In other paintings, Fischer imagines canvases hanging on walls, hit with swathes and squares of light pouring in from an unseen source. The fictional paintings and sculptures depict animals, food, city streets, or messy brushstrokes, but they—like the light—only exist within Fischer’s constructed environments; they need not adhere to any history, law, or logic.

Fischer presents characters and drawings that seem capable of disappearing at any moment. In one painting, a small orange bird sits on a branch, floating in a dark gray sky. Though its legs are in sharp focus, its body becomes a vaporous orb, glowing within the surrounding clouds. And in an uncanny sculptural ecosystem below, two motorized snails slowly wander through the gallery, leaving trails of slime in their wake. These gleaming lines, which evaporate over time, wind across the floor, uniting the other sculptures—a smoking volcano, a snowman, a palm tree—within a swirling, ephemeral landscape. Looming over the scene, the surrounding paintings form vivid, even cinematic, backdrops: a montage of disparate settings for a small, peculiar world.

– FROM GAGOSIAN WEBSITE

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Pop Minimalism 
Minimalist Pop

Opening reception: Tuesday, December 4, 5–8pm
December 5–9, 2018
Moore Building, Miami

On the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach 2018, Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch are pleased to present Pop Minimalism | Minimalist Pop, their fourth collaboration at the Moore Building in the Miami Design District. This group exhibition explores the intersections and legacies of two major American art movements of the 1960s—Pop art and Minimalism—and the ways in which features of Minimalism have been incorporated into a variety of contemporary art practices. While these two art movements are typically seen to represent opposing artistic responses to the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, the work in Pop Minimalism | Minimalist Pop highlights points of common conceptual approaches and mutual exchange. Work by Jeff Koons, Adam McEwen, Sarah Morris, and Richard Prince is included. – taken from website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson