ART-PRESENTATION: Echoes
The group exhibition “Echoes” is the third exhibition that is on presentation at Gagosian Gallery in San Francisco since its opening on January 9, 2018. “Echoes” is cross-generational show that pairs works by gallery artists based on generative resonance. On show are works by: Adriana Varejão, Richard Artschwager, Mary Weatherford, John Chamberlain, Jeff Wall and Cy Twombly.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
One of the most original voices in Contemporary Brazilian art, Adriana Varejão’s diverse practice comprises painting, sculpture, photography and installation. Two of her relief paintings, made more than a decade apart, are shown with a painting and sculpture by Richard Artschwager, an artist who since the early 1950s, has forged a unique path in 20th Century art, making visual comprehension of space and the everyday objects that occupy it strangely unfamiliar. Both artists underscoring the agonistic nature of painterly discourse. The intricate surfaces of Varejão’s “Ruína de Charque – Nova Capela” (2003) and “Bone-White Song” (2017), which simulate broken or cracked ceramic tiles, reveal illusionistic flesh and blood within, suggesting a rather more turbulent sequel to the totalizing abstractions of modernism, while Artschwager’s “Mirror” (1964) and “Seat of Judgment” (2008) parody hard-edge modernism in surreal domestic readymades made from mimetically patterned Formica. Mary Weatherford makes paintings that evoke a specific time, locale, and temperature. Her recent works, in which the canvases are affixed and sometimes juxtaposed with working neon light, provide an elusive and sometimes radical comment on the legacy of gestural abstraction. Mary Weatherford’s “Silver Writing” (2018), the first in a series of new paintings. As a major art figure in recent decades, Jeff Wall has developed a body of work that has profoundly changed the way we look at the photographic medium since the late 1970s. His large-scale color photograph “Boxing” (2011) finds both coincidence and counterpoint with Cy Twombly’s painting, “Death of Pompey (Rome)” (1962). In Wall’s cinematically composed frame, two youths spar in the close confines of a suburban living room, while Twombly’s epic work transposes an epochal assassination in Ancient Egypt into schematic notation. Both artists—one rooted in the vernacular present, the other in the classical past—stage the human drama and its histories in unique and inventive forms of narrative, myth, and apologue.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, Duration: 19/7-31/8/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
