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Gagosian Quarterly

April 21, 2017

Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends

Howard Hodgkin was one of the last century’s greatest painters. A recent show at London’s National Portrait Gallery persuasively argues that Hodgkin should also be canonized as one of its greatest portraitists. Absent Friends includes works that span from 1949 to 2016. In this affecting video interview, the show’s organizer and NPG senior curator Paul Moorhouse explains how, as Hodgkin evolved as an artist, he increasingly abstracted what people meant to him, representing people in his pictures through memories, evocations, and feelings. His viscerally intense works (like Absent Friends, the 2000–01 painting that gave the show its title), in which the aching feelings of presence, memory, and loss become increasingly palpable over time, argue most eloquently for Hodgkin as a sophisticated portraitist.

Artwork © Howard Hodgkin. Directed by Miriam Perez; Produced by PerryDuke

Still from video Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

Layla and Majnun

Layla and Majnun

A celebrated collaboration between Sir Howard Hodgkin and choreographer Mark Morris. Nancy Dalva takes us behind the scenes.

Howard Hodgkin From London to Hong Kong

Howard Hodgkin From London to Hong Kong

In Howard Hodgkin: From London to Hong Kong, we are welcomed into the celebrated painter’s London studio. Narrated by Robin Vousden.

Self portrait of Francesca Woodman, she stands against a wall holding pieces of ripped wallpaper in front of her face and legs

Francesca Woodman

Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.

self portrait by Jamian Juliano-Villani

Jamian Juliano-Villani and Jordan Wolfson

Ahead of her forthcoming exhibition in New York, Jamian Juliano-Villani speaks with Jordan Wolfson about her approach to painting and what she has learned from running her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s.

portrait of Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day

Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio in Long Island as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.

Black and white portrait of Katherine Dunham leaping in the air

Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955

Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the exhibition Border Crossings at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cocurated by Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, the show reexamines twentieth-century modern dance in the context of war, exile, and injustice. An accompanying catalogue, coedited by Bennahum and Rena Heinrich and published earlier this year, bridges the New York presentation with its West Coast counterpart at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Black and white portrait of Frida Escobedo

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Frida Escobedo

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2024, we are honored to present the architect Frida Escobedo.

Black and white portrait of Maria Grazia Chiuri looking directly at the camera

Fashion and Art: Maria Grazia Chiuri

Maria Grazia Chiuri has been the creative director of women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories collections at Dior since 2016. Beyond overseeing the fashion collections of the French house, she has produced a series of global collaborations with artists such as Judy Chicago, Mickalene Thomas, Penny Slinger, and more. Here she speaks with the Quarterly’s Derek Blasberg about her childhood in Rome, the energy she derives from her interactions and conversations with artists, the viral “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt, and her belief in the role of creativity in a fulfilled and healthy life.

Portrait of artist Kelsey Lu

Kelsey Lu

Art historian and curator Olivier Berggruen reflects on his trip to Berlin to see a performance by the multihyphenate Kelsey Lu. Following his experience of that performance, The Lucid, Berggruen caught up with Lu in New York, where they spoke about the visual elements of their work, dreaming, and the necessity of new challenges.

Portrait of twins Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe in front of a beach, one of them sits in a lawn chair and the other stands behind looking out of a spyglass

The Art of Biography: Mary Gabriel and Carol Kino

Carol Kino’s forthcoming biography of Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe, the identical twin sisters who blazed new trails in the world of photography—Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines—charts a critical moment in the United States, bringing to the surface questions around aesthetics, technologies, and gender through the arc of the twins’ lives. Here, Kino meets with award-winning biographer Mary Gabriel, whose 2023 publication Madonna: A Rebel Life described the unparalleled significance of the musician’s life and career, to discuss the origins of their most recent projects, as well as the specific considerations that underpin the process of narrating a life.

Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat sitting inside his studio and in front of his paintings

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Los Angeles

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, met with filmmaker Tamra Davis, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and author and curator Fred Hoffman to reflect on their experiences with the artist during the 1980s in Los Angeles.