Tag: Robert Rauschenberg

Gagosian’s Kara Vander Weg On Shaping the Afterlife of an Artist’s Work

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The Truck Trio as shown in “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience.” Courtesy Gagosian

Earlier this month, Gagosian debuted a stunning show featuring the work of Walter de Maria at its Le Bourget gallery in Paris. “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience” was curated by Donna De Salvo and featured at its heart The Truck Trilogy, a trio of vintage Chevrolet pickup trucks outfitted with De Maria’s signature stainless-steel rods. The work was conceived in 2011 and completed in 2017, four years after De Maria’s death at the age of 77.

This was the same year that the gallery launched its “Building a Legacy Program,” which marshals the gallery’s extensive resources to ensure that artists remain in the minds of the public in the future, whether they are young, old, or deceased, through educational efforts and ambitious shows like “The Singular Experience.” The program has been spearheaded by Kara Vander Weg, a managing director at the gallery, whom we caught up with to hear more about its origins and processes.

How did the idea for the Building a Legacy Program originate in 2017, and what gaps in artist or estate planning was it meant to address?

KVW: The catalyst was Walter De Maria, an artist who had been close to the gallery since the 1980s, dying in 2013 without a will. The lack of preparation threw his estate into turmoil but, fortunately, the gallery was able to help address a number of immediate practical needs, including preserving and documenting his archives. Nuanced decisions had to be made about his intentions and his work, including how it was displayed. Walter was incredibly precise and exacting, and to go from his presence, a resource that was always there, to nothing was a profound shock, particularly for Elizabeth Childress, who had managed his studio for decades.

Through our work with the Richard Avedon Foundation, which began in 2011, we learned a lot about the challenges and questions they faced when Dick had died suddenly several decades earlier. It has been instructive to learn about their organization, which is impressive, and implemented processes for decision-making as the artist would have wished.

Through our work with artists and with their subsequent estates and foundations—which is inevitable when working together over many years—we have seen that balancing an artist’s legacy with ongoing operational concerns can be incredibly challenging. As much as the gallery, as an entity outside of the family or studio, can be helpful, we want to be. For all artists, it is ideal to have some plans for legacy decisions in place. And as the value of art has grown, it has become even more important to have detailed wishes outlined, particularly when it comes to decisions like posthumous work, as well as planning for the resources necessary to carry an artist’s legacy forward.

A symposium felt like the right way to address some of these delicate topics and provide a space for knowledge sharing between our artists and others. Peer-to-peer support can be an exceptionally helpful resource, and many of the connections that have been made through the symposia continue to be fruitful for the artists and estates.

The team behind Gagosian Quarterly also saw an opportunity to address many of the questions on people’s minds through thoughtful content in the magazine. We launched an ongoing series featuring conversations with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that hopefully prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others.

In working with estates like Walter De Maria’s or Nam June Paik’s, what have been the most revealing challenges in realizing an artist’s intentions after death?

KVW: Honoring an artist’s wishes and intentions is always the biggest challenge.

With Walter, we’ve had to make decisions about how to install his work at a level he would have permitted. Fortunately, both Larry [Gagosian] and I worked closely with him and have those experiences to draw on. We also owe a great debt to Elizabeth Childress for her constant counsel. For example, Walter was always incredibly precise about the surface on which his floor sculptures rested; it had to be completely unmarked. For an exhibition at our 21st Street gallery while he was still alive, I remember we had to bring in a trompe l’oeil painter to touch up marks on the concrete floor before he would agree to go ahead with the show. And for the current exhibition at Le Bourget, we had to find solutions to address the floor beneath 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows. These might seem like small things, but we know how critical they were to Walter.

He was also very resistant to putting out too much information about his work, because he wanted viewers to have a focused, unmediated experience of it. The downside is that, as a result, people haven’t really come to understand the thinking behind his practice. That’s why, for the Le Bourget exhibition, curator Donna De Salvo has included a number of drawings, some of which have never been seen before, something that would never have happened during his lifetime. Our hope is that this will offer the wider public a way into Walter’s thinking: his precision, a bit of his humor, and the connections between his early work and the later pieces for which he became known. These are things we believe are important, not only for his legacy, but also for the scholarship around his work.

The circumstances of our work on behalf of Nam June Paik are very different, and my colleague Nick Simunovic is best placed to talk about it. [Writer’s note: They wanted Nick to jump in here so I said why not.]

NS: In the case of Nam June Paik, we partnered with the Estate, who had a clear sense of the artist’s wishes, and we worked tirelessly over a decade to realize a number of important goals.

When we began working with the Estate in 2015, they were keen to work with a major gallery as a way to shine a spotlight on Nam June’s work, particularly given that the last exhibition sanctioned by the artist was 20 years prior. Larry [Gagosian] had noted that he felt that the artist was a bit lost in the market, and that was a view shared by the family. There was also a realization that there were gaps in the holdings of American museums.

We laid out a multi-tiered plan that began with that first show in Hong Kong in 2015 and culminated with a major survey in New York planned for 2020. The opening was delayed by the COVID pandemic but eventually opened in 2022.

We brought in noted curator John G. Hanhardt, who also organized the retrospectives of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1982), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2011), in addition to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000). We were able to strategize and execute against the artist’s wishes because we had clear direction from the Estate, including Nam June’s nephew Ken Hakuta, and input from partners like John Hanhardt and Estate curator Jon Huffman.

As a result of those efforts, works by the artist from that 2022 exhibition were placed with major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Bass Museum of Art, filling a crucial gap in the artist’s canon and legacy.

How do you balance market considerations with curatorial or scholarly fidelity when guiding legacy work inside a commercial gallery?

KVW: The two are interconnected and I don’t think that is a bad thing, work needs to be placed with owners to ensure the highest level of scholarly fidelity. And good curatorial work can help to bolster an artist’s market.

The monograph Gagosian published for Walter De Maria is a great example. Little scholarly work had been done on his life, and through our work preserving the archive, we had an opportunity and the ability to take on the project. We had access to rarely seen archival material from his studio and the result is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s entire oeuvre that explores both his creative career and his personal life.

It was a massive undertaking that was many years in the making, but the publication will support both future sales and exhibitions of his work. It has already served as the catalogue for the Menil Collection’s 2022-23 exhibition, Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work.

The recent symposium in London gathered artists, curators, and foundation directors. What insights or points of friction surfaced about the future of legacy stewardship?

KVW: It was our third symposium on the topic of legacy planning, and there was a fascinating session during which I spoke with Mary Dean, Ed Ruscha’s studio director; Waltraud Forelli, Anselm Kiefer’s studio director and board member of the Eschaton–Anselm Kiefer Foundation; and Vladimir Yavachev, director of operations for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. A key takeaway from our conversation was the critical importance of hiring an archivist, ideally while an artist is alive.

Waltraud rightly pointed out that in addition to helping from an organizational perspective, hiring an archivist brought a realization that they couldn’t do everything alone. They needed to plan for a younger generation to continue their work and to take the time now to transfer that knowledge. For Vladimir, who has catalogue raisonné preparations underway, an archivist is particularly important given the volume of material that Christo and Jeanne-Claude retained.

Mary Dean emphasized another important point, the value of openness, even when addressing a sensitive topic like planning for a future one won’t be part of. For Ed, this is a living, evolving process that he actively engages in through the thoughtful placement of his works and archival material with institutional partners. For instance, the Getty Museum is currently in the process of receiving his street photograph archive. All of his films and artistbook archives are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. He has also made significant donations: Ed was born in Omaha, Nebraska, so the Joslyn Art Museum has a substantial collection of his work, and he has donated work to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Oklahoma City.

Younger artists such as Titus Kaphar are building institutions during their lifetimes. How is the conversation about legacy changing for living artists?

KVW: There is a generation of artists today who are interested in philanthropic endeavors beyond their own artistic practices. Providing space and resources for the creation of foundations and community projects is a big priority and perhaps is an indication of legacy planning taking shape much earlier in artists’ careers.

There is a tradition of artists stepping up and supporting other artists, one example is Theaster Gates, who has devoted the past 15 years to his Rebuild Foundation. It’s a mantle that artists including Ellen Gallagher and Titus Kaphar are taking up with projects like the Nina Simone House and NXTHVN, respectively.

But this process isn’t new, there is a history of artist support with someone like Robert Rauschenberg, who during his lifetime formed an entity to help other artists, as did Roy Lichtenstein.

For galleries, support of an artist needs to evolve to include these priorities, which could be advice around the organization of studio resources or the make-up of a Board of Directors.

With “The Singular Experience” now open in Paris, featuring De Maria’s Truck Trilogy and 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows, what does this presentation demonstrate about Gagosian’s collaboration with the De Maria Estate? What are the lessons there for other artists planning their estate?

KVW: The relationship with Walter has always been very personal, his friendship and working relationship with Larry [Gagosian] stretches back more than 35 years, and it has anchored our long commitment to him and his work.

The approach is methodical and takes time, but the exhibition at Le Bourget is a product of that commitment. It’s his second show in the space and one that we had actually begun discussing before he died in 2013.

Showing Truck Trilogy outside of the United States for the first time is incredibly exciting. It was his last sculpture, conceived in 2011 and completed posthumously in 2017 according to his specific directions, so it touches on a lot of what we have talked about. It’s also wonderful to be showing 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows at the same time as his inclusion in the exhibition “Minimal,” curated by Dia Art Foundation’s director Jessica Morgan at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris. And it’s all taking place in the same month as Walter would have turned 90.

But the exhibitions are just one piece in a broader program that aims to cement and extend his legacy, from placing a group of early sculpture and drawings with The Menil Collection (a family that were early champions of the artist) and working with Dia Art Foundation to help conserve The Lightning Field to working tirelessly to publish his monograph. And the work continues as we try to find a home for his archive.

For artists working today, it can be hard to have the patience to play the long game, but that thought and planning is key. It can also be useful to talk with other artists and studios who are focused on this work. One of the benefits from the symposium was the exchange of ideas and the conversations that happened outside the sessions.

Looking across the gallery’s roster, what qualities distinguish the artists who are most intentional about shaping their own legacies while still alive? What do they have in common?

KVW: They have a clear sense of purpose regarding the direction of their work and its legacy. They like control, either maintaining it themselves or wisely bringing in the right studio leadership. They’ve built strong museum connections and have access to resources in terms of staff and space. It’s a reminder of the symbiotic relationship between the market and legacy, artists need resources to actively plan for the future.

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Dan Duray

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November 28, 2025
London Sees Its Best Evening Auction Results in Years

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The October evening sales brought the London auction houses their highest totals in years. Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Sales aren’t just buoyant at Frieze this week—London’s auction houses also saw their strongest results in years, signaling renewed confidence at the top of the market. Kicking off the action, Christie’s 20th/21st Century London Evening Sale on October 15 achieved a robust £106,925,400 ($142,852,000), marking the auction house’s best Frieze Week evening sale in more than seven years. The total was up 30 percent from last year, with 92 percent sold by lot and 90 percent sold by value. Katharine Arnold and Keith Gill, vice-chairmen of 20th/21st century art, Christie’s Europe, reported entering the week with confidence and “carefully priced material,” noting a “spirited and well-attended” public viewing at King Street. “We are proud to have realized such a solid outcome during Frieze Week, a moment that highlights the energy and cultural vitality of London’s art scene,” they told press.

Leading the sale was Peter Doig’s monumental Ski Jacket (1994), which sold for £14,270,000 ($19,064,720) against a £6,000,000-8,000,000 estimate after more than 13 minutes of fierce bidding between six contenders. Carrying a third-party guarantee, the painting had been acquired in 1994 by Danish collector Ole Faarup, and 100 percent of the proceeds will now go to his foundation. This unusual arrangement also helped Christie’s secure two additional Doigs, despite the artist having become a rare presence at auction.

With an extensive exhibition history, Doig’s Country Rock (1998-1999) nearly hit seven figures in sterling—though it comfortably did so in dollars—achieving £9,210,000 ($12,304,560). A third, more abstract and heavily textured work, also acquired by Faarup in 1994, sold a few lots later just shy of its high estimate at £635,000. The strong results coincided with the opening of Doig’s new show at the Serpentine in London, further fueling demand.

Christie’s evening opened with a standout result for Domenico Gnoli, whose hyperrealistic painting fetched £977,000, doubling its low estimate. Immediately after, a more impressionistic landscape by René Magritte landed at £762,990—well above expectations—reinforcing both continued momentum for the artist and the broader strength of surrealism. Later in the sale, Magritte’s drawing La veillée (The Vigil) exceeded its £500,000 high estimate, selling for £812,800.

The 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s resulted in several new artist records. Photo: Guy Bell | Courtesy of Christie’s

Picasso, as usual, delivered dependable results, with several works selling above or within estimate, including the £2,002,000 oil and ink on panel Chevalier, pages et moine. The modern and impressionist offerings also performed within expectations, largely due to the quality of the material: a Marc Chagall painting fetched £2,246,000, while a lyrical bucolic scene by Nabis painter Maurice Denis sold for £1,697,000. Meanwhile, a horizontal abstract work by Hurvin Anderson exceeded expectations, fetching £3,222,000.

The sale also set several new world auction records, underscoring the ongoing momentum for women artists and long-overlooked names being rediscovered. Paula Rego’s Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” (1995) soared to £3,466,000 ($4.63 million), setting a new landmark record for the artist. Suzanne Valadon’s Deux nus ou Le bain (1923) followed with a £1,016,000 ($1.36 million) record. Contemporary sculptor Annie Morris’s Bronze Stack 9, Copper Blue (2015) achieved £482,600 ($644,754), while Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær set his first auction record with Aske and Johan upside down kissing in Power Play at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND (2020), which sold for £25,400 ($33,934).

Among the few unsold works of the night were Yoshitomo Nara’s drawing Haze Days, which failed to find a buyer at its ambitious £6.5-8.5 million estimate, and a gray monochrome by Gerhard Richter—even with the artist opening a major survey at the Fondation Louis Vuitton during Paris Art Week. A black Blinky Palermo also went unsold, while a colorful but slightly less iconic Nicholas Party work, Tree Trunks, was withdrawn ahead of the sale.

Notably, Christie’s reported that 56 percent of buyers in the evening sale came from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with only 28 percent from the Americas and 16 percent from the Asia-Pacific region. This confirms revived demand in the regional market, as also evidenced earlier in the day by the heavy attendance at Frieze.

A £17.6M Bacon headlined at Sotheby’s

Led by a £17.6 million Francis Bacon, Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction closed at $63.5 million. While the total was less than half of Christie’s the night before, the comparison needs context: this was Sotheby’s third major London evening sale since March—whereas it was Christie’s first of the season. Sotheby’s has already staged two major white-glove sales this year—the £101 million Karpidas collection auction in September and the £84 million Summer Evening Sale—meaning that with last night’s results, the house has now sold £233 million worth of modern and contemporary art in London since March. Moreover, the £63.5 million total marked the highest October evening sale result since 2023, up 25 percent from the previous year.

Since March, Sotheby’s has sold £240 million worth of Modern and Contemporary art in London. Courtesy Sotheby’s

“Frieze is always a special time for London, with so many collectors in town whose presence we always feel in our sales,” Ottilie Windsor, co-head of contemporary art, Sotheby’s London, told Observer. “It was great to have them with us tonight and to see so much live action in the room, helping sustain the strong momentum we’ve built over the past few seasons here.”

The Francis Bacon result came after 20 minutes of suspense and fierce bidding across multiple phone specialists and a bidder in the room, pushing the final price to nearly double its £6-9 million estimate. In U.S. dollars, the hammer plus fees rose to $17.6 million. For comparison, the last notable Bacon—Portrait of Man with Glasses II—sold at Christie’s in March for £6,635,000 ($8.4 million), and that work was almost a third smaller. Another, smaller Bacon, closer in scale to Christie’s example, sold here for £5,774,000 ($7.3 million). Bacon’s record still stands at $142.4 million, set at Christie’s New York in 2013 with his triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud.

The sale opened strong, with solid results for several younger contemporary artists who have recently drawn both market and institutional attention. At lot one, a painting by Ser Serpas landed at £27,940 ($35,700)—just under estimate but still enough to set a new auction record for the artist. The California-born painter, who studied in Switzerland and gained early recognition there, was recently included in a MoMA PS1 exhibition and held a solo show at Kunsthalle Basel during the June fairs.

Two of the hottest rising names in recent auctions—driven largely by Asian demand and limited primary-market availability—followed. An abstract by Emma McIntyre, now a Zwirner favorite, sold for £50,800 ($65,000), and Yu Nishimura achieved the same price. Both works carried estimates of £40,000-60,000, reflecting the tight competition at this level.

In between, a 2009 painting by Hernan Bas acquired from Perrotin sold just above its low estimate, likely to its guarantor, at £254,000 ($323,000). Momentum continued for Lucy Bull, whose kaleidoscopic abstraction from 2021—originally acquired from Paris gallery High Art—more than doubled its top estimate of £500,000 ($635,000), landing at £1,260,000 ($1.6 million) after being chased by five bidders, most from Asia.

Overall, the auction confirmed the ongoing strength of the market for women artists, all of whom sold above estimate. Sotheby’s also posted strong results for Paula Rego: her pastel on paper Snow White Playing with her Father’s Trophies sold within estimate for £900,000 (about $1.15 million), while Jenny Saville’s charcoal study exceeded its high estimate, selling for £533,000 (around $675,000).

Among other notable six-figure results, a monumental El Anatsui sold just shy of its high estimate at £1,999,000 (about $2.53 million). Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (The Arm) from 1982—a pivotal year in the artist’s rise—landed squarely within estimate at £5,530,000 (approximately $7 million). Andy Warhol’s Four Pink Marilyn (Reversal) followed, selling within estimate for £4,326,000 (about $5.5 million).

The masters also held firm. Both of Auguste Rodin’s monumental sculptures from his seminal series The Burghers of Calais sold within estimate to a collector in the room: Jean de Fiennes, vêtu, Grand Modèle achieved £762,000 ($1 million), while Pierre de Wiessant, vita, Grand Modèle, vêtu sold for £889,000 ($1.2 million).

The market for Lucio Fontana also showed signs of recovery—at least for major works. His rare blue 14-slashed Concetto spaziale, Attese sold just above estimate at £2.8 million (about $3.7 million) following a fierce bidding war among four potential buyers. The deep blue of the canvas was inspired by Yves Klein’s IKB pigment—but Klein’s own Untitled Fire Colour Painting (FC 28), which appeared one lot earlier, surprisingly went unsold after failing to meet its £1.8-2 million estimate ($2.3-2.5 million), despite both an irrevocable bid and a guarantee.

Other unsold works of the night included paintings by Frank Auerbach and Daniel Richter. Still, Sotheby’s achieved a healthy 89 percent sell-through rate by lot.

On October 17, Sotheby’s also staged a single-owner sale of 17 iPad drawings by David Hockney from his celebrated series The Arrival of Spring. The results were remarkable: the group doubled its high estimate to reach £6.2 million ($8.3 million), achieving a white-glove sale and setting a new auction record for the artist. With this result, Sotheby’s London has now brought in £240 million (approximately $304 million) since March. Notably, American buyers accounted for 40 percent of the purchasers in the Hockney sale, underscoring the continued global demand for blue-chip British artists.

A £2,374,000 Basquiat tops Phillips’ London Evening Sale

On October 16 at 5 p.m., Phillips hosted its London Modern & Contemporary Evening Sale, achieving a total of £10,332,200 ($13,884,410) across 22 lots. The auction was more modest—and less successful—than the others, posting a 32 percent drop compared to last year after four lots failed to sell and four others were withdrawn before the start. The evening was led by a new auction record for Emma McIntyre: Seven types of ambiguity (2021) sold for £167,700 ($225,355) from a modest £50,000-70,000 estimate, edging past her previous record of $201,600 set in May 2025 at Phillips Hong Kong. The second-highest lot of the night was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Pestus) (1982), which comfortably met its pre-sale estimate at £2,374,000 ($3,190,181).

An energetic moment from Phillips’s London Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Courtesy Phillips

Once again, contemporary women artists confirmed their momentum at Phillips, reaching a high point after Emma McIntyre’s record-setting result when Flora Yukhnovich’s My Body knows Un-Heard of Songs (2017) fetched £1,276,000 ($1,714,689) against a £900,000-1,500,000 estimate.

Opening the sale was a purple-and-pink abstraction by Martha Jungwirth—now a familiar presence across Thaddaeus Ropac’s fair booths—which exceeded expectations at £180,600. A few lots later, an early work by Sasha Gordon sold just shy of its high estimate at £116,100. Demand for Gordon has been reignited by her blockbuster solo debut at Zwirner in New York, which made her the youngest artist represented by the mega-gallery. Painted in 2019 during her studies, Drive Through marks a transitional moment in her shift toward the more discursive, cartoon-inflected style that catapulted her into the global spotlight.

Later in the sale, Noah Davis’s Mitrice Richardson (2012) found a buyer within estimate at £451,500 ($606,726), while Derek Fordjour’s Regatta Pattern Study (2020) fetched £528,900 ($710,736), surpassing its high estimate of £500,000. Other notable results included Sean Scully’s Wall of Light Summer Night 5.10 (2010), which achieved £967,500 ($1,300,127) against a £600,000-800,000 estimate, and Robert Rauschenberg’s Gospel Yodel (Salvage Series), which sold for £709,500 ($953,426), more than doubling its £350,000-550,000 estimate. A 2012 sculpture by Bernar Venet fetched £516,000 ($693,401) from a £250,000-350,000 estimate, reflecting the artist’s rising demand—particularly in Asia.

Not everything landed. A Warhol-inspired Banksy portrait of Kate Moss, estimated at £700,000-1,000,000, failed to find a buyer, while a cacophonic abstract work by Sigmar Polke from 1983-84 also went unsold, likely due to its overly ambitious £600,000-800,000 estimate relative to current market demand for the artist.

For Olivia Thornton, Phillips’s head of modern and contemporary art, Europe, the overall positive auction reflected “the vibrancy of contemporary collecting” and reaffirmed London’s enduring magnetism: “London remains the cultural crossroads of the global art market.”

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Elisa Carollo

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October 17, 2025
Gina Beavers On Targeting Comfort in Consumer Culture in Her New Show

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Gina Beavers in her studio. Photo Macy Rajacich

Artist Gina Beavers is primarily known for her straightforward tridimensional painting objects, or relief paintings, that take their subjects from the endless flux of online commercial visuals that inspire our daily consumption of products and experiences: exaggerated lips, glossy makeup palettes and visually appealing junk foods artfully arranged are among the advertising icons you’ll find in her work. But for her new solo show, which opens at Marianne Boesky Gallery on September 5, Beavers has conceived a far more abstract and comforting body of new works. These new “Comfortcore Paintings” were inspired by the endless variety of sheets and towels available online and their seductive power to activate our senses and desires.

The landscape of online communication has rapidly evolved since the artist started painting social media-derived narrative subjects in the aughts, when users exercised a greater degree of control over what they saw on Instagram, Amazon and elsewhere. “The algorithm has changed a lot, which has changed how we interact with the internet and the kinds of images you can come across,” Beavers told Observer during a studio visit. “I was appropriating food images or makeup tutorials for a long time, but now I don’t receive that content. Everything is tailor-made to offer you what you are looking for. I was looking for new bed sheets and towels when I started to conceive the works in the show.”

The exhibition, titled “Divine Consumer,” relates to Beavers’ way of intuitively reading, appropriating and remediating those digital images of commercial products which, from the flatness of their digital presentation, are brought back to their seductive tactility, sensuality and physicality that communicate the concept of comfort. She explores this in the series by focusing on the comforting range of patterns, textures and colors that function as psychological triggers to encourage us to indulge in a purchase, prompted to buy by the promise of softness.

Beavers translates the concept into simulacra with her signature tridimensional surrogates that, here, are already something more like painting objects: physically molding and reshaping those images, Beavers brings them back to life with uncanny closeups that stimulate our senses. The works in “Divine Consumer,” in particular, engage even more with tactility. They look soft, and one naturally wants to touch and caress them. These new relief paintings also represent an evolution in Bevers’ art-making process. The resulting pieces are less heavy with less paint—she uses foam, braiding it to emulate texture, molding the movements of the fabric and later painting them into an image. Despite being static physical objects, her works activate multisensorial reactions in the same way flat images on screens do as we passively scroll.

Gina Beavers, Knit weighted blanket landscape, 2024; Oil, acrylic, foam and wood stain on panel, 73 1/2 x 107 x 9 inches / 186.7 x 271.8 x 22.9 cm. Copyright of Gina Beavers. Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

Although she does not apply any ready-made technique, the hyperrealism of Beavers’ works directly links her practice with Pop and New Realist artists who similarly commented on consumerism and popular cultures, like Robert Rauschenberg or Claes Oldenburg. She readily acknowledges these direct references and embraces them as continuing a legacy of a practice that is deeply rooted in the American culture of mass production and mass communication. It is, for her, the only way to experience this current reality: “I don’t know how to experience living without stuff,” she said. “I don’t know how to talk about life without everything we consume or the fact that we spend so much of our life in these consumption networks.”

More than that, her hyperrealistic compositions serve as a commentary on an entire cultural attitude. “In America, you go to someone’s house and you get the nice set of towels, which is how they’re marketed—it’s the capitalist kind of system that forces you to get more than one,” she reflected as we previewed the works in the show.

In pursuing her visual and semiological research into the culture of consumerism, Beavers applies the technique of collage, which, as in its cubist and Dadaist origins, combines materials stemming from different contexts to coexist and draws new trajectories of meaning from their dialectic juxtapositions. For the artist, collage is both a way to confront the chaotic, random flow of images we are all overexposed to and to find new vocabularies with which to decode this flux and find some order. It’s how she claims creative agency over a barrage of materials and messages. “It reflects my inability to pick up on a narrative from the internet and social media because it is chaotic,” Beavers explained. “There’s this idea of divine inspiration when you’re collating, as you’re putting things together. I’m creating something independently from this chaos.”

SEE ALSO: ‘Richard Serra, A Film and Video Exhibition’ at Dia Chelsea Celebrates His Cinematic Oeuvre

Scrolling through Google and Amazon, Beavers selects and captures images of comforters, towels and all those textile accessories of a domestic world meant to communicate care, coziness and comfort. She then pulls them out of their online environment and combines them via Photoshop into collages that rework them, mostly through intuition, drawing connections with traditional painting genres, particularly still life and landscapes.

Gina Beavers, Blue gingham still life (pie and casserole covers, crib sheets), 2024; Oil, acrylic, putty, paper pulp, foam and wood stain on panel
60 x 45 1/2 x 7 inches / 152.4 x 115.6 x 17.8 cm. Copyright of Gina Beavers. Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

In translating images into a third dimension for the upcoming show, her signature object paintings appear in fewer works and there are more objects modeled with foam directly on wood panels. Some pieces slated to show at Marianne Boesky Gallery are materially more elaborate than others, depending on the fabric of the subject. For instance, Beavers meticulously braided and weaved foam as fabric to replicate the intricate texture of red wool blankets. “I’ve used linen on my paintings because I wanted them to have a conversation about the history of painting,” she mused, “but for this series, I just started to question why it mattered.”

Beavers has also been experimenting with scale. The larger works seem to envelop the viewer, while the minor works are studies in which it’s easy to get lost in the details of the interplay of light and shadow. There’s something obsessive yet extremely comforting in her precision. Indeed, it’s this precision—her extreme and almost obsessive hyperrealism—that makes Beavers’ work unique. It not only reflects on but also isolates and remediates fragments of the endless flood of digital images, bringing them back to the physical world and the human needs that created them.

Gina Beavers, American Soft towel set in Ruby, 2024; Oil, acrylic, putty, paper pulp, foam and wood stain on panel, 23 1/2 x 23 3/4 x 6 inches/ 59.7 x 60.3 x 15.2 cm. Copyright of Gina Beavers. Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

The new series Beavers is presenting at the gallery represents a new stage of maturity in her work: she appears to be much more confident with her language and choice of subjects, as well as with her artistic research into the contemporary materialist imagery that has invaded our lives, totalizing our experience of the world and promising to heal all our problems with “retail therapy.” Amid the uncertainty of our time and rising political tensions, the artist reflected, ads for home goods can appear “safe,” as they contain no hidden agendas, no misleading propaganda. They ask us to buy, promising some version of fulfillment in return. After all, beyond our desire for transcendence or justice or hope, we all have physical desires that objects can help us satisfy.

Gina Beavers’s “Divine Consumer” opens at Marianne Boesky Gallery on September 5 and remains on view through October 5.

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Elisa Carollo

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September 2, 2024
Observer’s Guide to the Must-Visit Museums and Art Experiences in Chicago

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This is everything art lovers should prioritize during a long weekend visit to the Windy City. Sawyer Bengtson

In Chicago, the very weather urges exploration of the city’s expansive artistic offerings. Each of my visits has been during the deepest part of its no-nonsense winters when the warmth of one of its many museums can be lifesaving in a literal sense. And I’m told that the sticky heat and humidity of peak summer is similarly indoor-inspiring—why not cool off with some of the world’s greatest artworks?

Climatic motivations aside, it is easy for art lovers of any predilections to spend countless days on end wandering the vast artistic opportunities afforded by the Windy City. To see it all during a short visit is impossible, so let’s go through a few essentials that you can and should fit into, say, a long weekend in Chicago.

No matter your tastes, the Art Institute of Chicago should be the most essential addition to your itinerary. Depending on your breadth of interest, it can easily demand three to five hours to give it its proper due. Masterpieces spanning all eras, traditions, and regions abound. Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. A smattering of Jacob Lawrence. O’Keeffe, Rivera, Matisse, Hokusai, Warhol, Bacon, Pollack, and so on and so forth. Ancient Buddhist statues. American Gothic. You get the idea.

Art lovers take pictures of Nighthawks by Edward Hopper at the Art Institute of Chicago. NurPhoto via Getty Images

From there take the #3 bus for fifteen minutes to the Museum of Contemporary Art, which famously hosted the first American exhibition of Frida Kahlo. Here again, you’ll encounter some of the greatest works by renowned artists like Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Chuck Close, Dan Flavin, Kara Walker, Rauschenberg, Warhol and the rest. The MCA also tends to have outstanding visiting exhibitions from the most exciting names working today. Currently on view is a major survey exhibition, “Nicole Eisenman: What Happened,” which showcases 100 works produced by the artist from 1992 to today.

Chicago’s MCA houses some of the greatest works by renowned contemporary artists. © MCA Chicago

Between these two museums, you have a full day of art. The former requires more time than the latter, so I’d suggest seeing the Institute in the morning, breaking for lunch, then hitting up the MCA. For a hearty bite on the way between the two, you can’t go wrong with Crushed By Giants Brewing Company.

From here I recommend three places that you can pick and choose based on your available time, location and inclinations. They’re a bit more niche, disparately scattered across the city, and in one case may still be closed for renovations.

The National Veterans Art Museum was initially launched with the involvement of soldiers who had participated in the Vietnam War, and today it displays works from thousands of veteran artists who engaged across a range of conflicts. Three exhibitions stand out. Inspired by the Tim O’Brien novel of the same name, The Things They Carried portrays the personal narratives of artists from the Vietnam War. On a related note, Above and Beyond—one of the largest memorials to American troops killed in Vietnam—is comprised of 58,307 dog tags bearing the names of the dead and serves as a chilling reminder of the human meat grinder that is war. And then there’s Vonnegut, which displays fifty prints by the famed novelist that tend to be of a more playfully surreal nature.

The National Museum of Mexican Art is an absolute eruption of color thanks to the south-of-the-border tendency to incorporate vibrant hues. Home to nearly 20,000 pieces dating from today on back to the pre-colonial era, here you’ll find one of the most impressive collections of Mexican indigenous art outside of Mexico itself, as well as a slew of stunning pieces from leading artists of the past century. Added bonus: it’s free every day.

One of the many striking works in the National Museum of Mexican Art. Photo by Bruno PEROUSSE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

If you’re visiting after the summer of 2024, check if Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art has reopened. Dedicated to gathering works from artists on the fringes of society, it’s a truly one-of-a-kind collection spanning outsider figures like Miles Carpenter, Minnie Evans, Mr. Imagination, Purvis Young, and Chicago’s own Wesley Willis and Henry Darger, among many others.

Speaking of Chicago’s own, spend some time simply wandering around and taking in the fantastic architecture. A perfect encapsulation of this is the Driehaus Museum, a restored late 19th-century house that is a compact masterpiece of art nouveau. The gilded ceiling in the Chicago Cultural Center is the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world. The Wrigley Building stands like a castle teleported straight out of the Renaissance. The biomimicry of Aqua Tower. The Blade Runner imperiousness of 875 N. Michigan Ave. The Dutch/Brutalist fusion of TheMART. The Robie House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The list could go on and on.

Finally, Chicago is well known for its fine comedic arts, so plan to hit up a comedy club some evening. The Second City is its most famed stage, but Zanies, the iO and Laugh Factory are all reliably funny options.

In terms of where to stay in Chicago, the city is packed with stellar accommodations, but if you’re leaning into art experiences book 21c Museum Hotel. It’s a quality hotel by all the usual metrics, but you’re there for the art, which is all over the place and frequently unusual. Also, get a hot dog. Few places in the world make such artistry of tubed meat.

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Nick Hilden

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July 13, 2024
‘Taking Venice’ Review: A Tasty Doc About Robert Rauschenberg Winning the 1964 Venice Biennale. But Was It a U.S. ‘Conspiracy’? Uh, No

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If you want to know how the definition of “scandal” has changed with the decades, you couldn’t do much better than to see “Taking Venice,” Amei Wallach’s highly enjoyable and revealing documentary about a legendary uproar in the art world. The film chronicles what happened at the 1964 Venice Biennale — the exhibition of contemporary art, held every two years, that culminates in the awarding of an esteemed grand prize. At the time, the Biennale was considered to be a kind of art-world equivalent of the Olympic Games. Not just artists but the nations they represented were jockeying for cultural supremacy. In the ’50s and early ’60s, the grand prize often went to the French (Matisse, Max Ernst, Georges Braque), but in 1964 the U.S. decided to mount a campaign of “cultural diplomacy” in the hopes that one of its own artists — Robert Rauschenberg — would win the Biennale.

Rauschenberg’s mixed-media paintings, known as “combines,” were dazzling and insurrectionary. They were three-dimensional in every way: They jutted out at the viewer, they deliriously juxtaposed image and abstraction, and they busted down the door to the pop-art revolution. They were bold and exquisite. U.S. bureaucratic officials didn’t pretend to be art critics, but even they knew what they had. They saw that an artist like Rauschenberg was on the cutting edge of an aesthetic new wave, and that his paintings could say something about the kind of country America was becoming.

The U.S. wanted to use art as a proxy to assert its global dominance (in no small part to fight the Cold War). It was comparable to what went on during the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, which were viewed, by the U.S. and Germany and by the world at large, as a literal and metaphorical showdown between two ways of life, with the Black track superstar Jesse Owens embodying the American ideal, and the runners of Nazi Germany standing in for Hitler’s racist fantasy of a physically superior Aryan nation. (You might say that Owens’ triumph presaged the defeat of Germany in WWII.)

Yet the 1964 Venice Biennale wasn’t just another international contest. The event marked a paradigm shift: the overthrow of Paris as the center of the art world, and the movement toward a new age in which New York and its freewheeling American stars (Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol) would now hold sway.

At the Biennale, the U.S. backed Rauschenberg with a massive promotional campaign, one that the movie, at times, flirts with labeling a “conspiracy.” Everyone there knew that the Americans were throwing their weight around, working vigorously to do everything within their power to win the grand prize. But did they do anything underhanded? Not really. No palms were greased; no external political pressure was exerted. It was more a matter of press releases and one memorable party. The figures who colluded in pushing for Rauschenberg included the American art curator Alice Denney and the silky-smooth Alan Solomon, director of the Jewish Museum, who put the exhibition together. They were joined by the fabled art dealer Leo Castelli, who already had no peer when it came to working the room, and Castelli’s ex-wife, Ileana Sonneband, who had opened her own gallery in Paris, where she remained in partnership with Castelli. They were all working, in their way, to bring the news: that the American art revolution was the new royalty. The Harvey Weinstein Oscar machine of the ’90s would have approved.

“Taking Venice” is, in part, a portrait of Rauschenberg, and he’s mysterious and charismatic enough to make you want to see a biopic about him. The young Gary Oldman, with his sexy smirk, would have been perfect casting (and Oldman could still play Rauschenberg in middle age). Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, both gay, had a very similar clean-cut mystique, and they became romantic partners. Johns, with his targets and flags, was part of the 1964 Biennale exhibit too; the film gives us tantalizing hints of their complex camaraderie.

Within the PR, there was a notable quirk. Each nation’s artists were exhibited at a separate national pavilion in Venice. But the American pavilion was deemed too small and shoddy (which, in fact, it was). So it was arranged for Rauschenberg’s paintings to be displayed in the stately American consulate, a building that wasn’t, at that point, even being used. But when it looked like he was on the verge of winning the grand prize, a mini hullabaloo ensued. Had the Americans broken the rules? Would Rauschenberg be disqualified because his paintings were being displayed in the wrong building? The seven members of the jury were divided on the issue. It was the sort of tempest in a teapot that takes on a global significance, like spending six months deciding the shape of the table to be used to negotiate the end of the Vietnam War. At the last minute, barges were brought in to move Rauschenberg’s paintings from the consulate to the American pavilion. So now, the paintings were in the right place. But was this a scandal?

“Taking Venice” is a very good documentary, though with a hint of pearl-clutching. There’s a “We were shocked, shocked…” undercurrent to the whole thing. There are talking heads, like the art scholar Hiroko Ikegami, who suggest that the win by Rauschenberg was “engineered.” Yet the grand irony — and, you might say, the grand joke — of the 1964 Venice Biennale is that no rules were broken, and that the Americans were accused of using aggressive PR tactics (which they did) to push the artist who overwhelmingly deserved to win. “We didn’t cheat,” says Alice Denney. “We had a goal. As all countries did.” Imagine that Paramount Pictures was accused, in 1972, of mounting a relentless campaign for “The Godfather” to win best picture. Maybe they did. But if so, who cares?

Okay, I get it. The art world of 1964 was a far more civilized and decorous place. It didn’t do public relations. But that’s part of what was changing — and that, in a way, is the true fascination of “Taking Venice,” that it captures the moment when the art world, in thrall to the electricity of the new Americans, changed its spots. The critic Irving Sandler points out that the art market as we know it didn’t even exist until 1958, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” for $30,000. Art had not yet come together with media.

When it did, at the Biennale, everyone was jolted. The same way they were jolted by the very idea of Warhol’s paintings, which made art and media into the same thing (and then did something 1,000 times as audacious: found incandescence in that fusion). You could say that the U.S., at the Biennale, engaged in art-world propaganda. But another way to look at it is: Has there ever been a more righteous U.S. propaganda campaign? We were backing the right horse, and for the right reason. It was the one with the most beauty.

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Owen Gleiberman

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May 30, 2024