PRESENTATION: Beginning

Juxtaposing four key contemporary works in a spare, contemplative arrangement inspired by a 1994 exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s and Rudolf Stingel’s work at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria, the exhibition “Beginning” considers the impact of recent traumatic world events on our collective perception of art and culture. Reflecting a pervasive sense of mourning in the face of death and disaster, it invites quiet, sustained meditation on the often painful process of transition from one state of being to another.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

The two works of installation in “Beginning” reconfigure our experience of the gallery space, adopting familiar physical structures to establish a resonant metaphorical realm. Rudolf Stingel has been making works with carpet since a 1991 exhibition at Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York, for which he covered the floor in a wall-to-wall bright orange variant.  The beaded curtain of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled (Beginning)” (1994) has a similarly transformative effect on our passage through the room, and a comparable sense of poetic gravitas. Gonzalez-Torres’s beaded curtain works are installed in a natural passageway or across the full span of a site, thus ensuring that individuals must pass through the curtain if they wish to move through the space. The contact that visitors make with the shimmering cascade of green and silver may allude to the fear of bodily touch that accompanied the early years of the AIDS crisis, just as it may suggest similar anxieties ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. The work’s form also marks out a quasi-mystical portal, inviting us to step from a familiar, shared space into an unknown realm—one potentially fraught with danger, but which also extends the vital promise of a fresh start. In Maurizio Cattelan’s mural “Father” (2021), a colossal black-and-white representation of the artist’s bare feet looms over the gallery interior. Its title alludes to the artist’s complex relationship with his own parent, while the image recalls widely circulated images of the feet of executed guerilla leader Che Guevara. It also harks back to Cattelan’s “Daddy, Daddy” (2008), a sculpture of the hero of Walt Disney’s Pinocchio that was first installed facedown in the fountain at the base of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda as part of the exhibition “theanyspacewhatever” (2008–09) as if having fallen to his death, any filial cry for help having gone unheeded. Father conveys Hamlet’s ultimate dilemma—“to die, to sleep”—a choice between the avoidance of violent reality and the risk of succumbing to it. In “Spiritual America 4” (2005), Richard Prince, too, focuses on the meaning and power of a specific body, examining ideas of context and complicity. The suggestive photograph of a forty-year-old Brooke Shields is a direct response to the artist’s 1983 artwork “Spiritual America”. Where the earlier work appropriated a photograph by Gary Gross of Shields taken when she was ten years old—which the actress and her mother later sued to suppress—the image featured in the exhibition was taken by Prince later in Shields’s life with her engaged participation.

Works by: Maurizio Cattelan, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Richard Prince, and Rudolf Stingel

Photo: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled” (Beginning) [detail], 1994, Strands of beads and hanging device, dimensions vary with installation, © Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Photo: Kioku Keizo, Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation and Gagosian

Info: Curator: Francesco Bonami, Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA, USA, Duration: 23/4-4/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, https://gagosian.com