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Georg Baselitz - Jumping Over My Shadow

Gagosian Gallery (NY) 2016 ISBN 9781938748332 Acqn 26905
Hb 26x31cm 108pp 45col ills 84
In these new works, with the intentionally obscured use of color, Baselitz conveys the sense of
these bodies through the materiality of paint. In Abgang mit Marcel (Leaving with Marcel) (2016),
drips of paint create a tangled vascular system for a ghostly, even weightless, figure. Its milkywhite, partly translucent body oozes down the canvas, the head already beyond the edge. As
suggested by its title, the work refers to Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase (1912),
but instead of following a prismatic Cubist descent, Baselitzs nude simply vanishes. Its feet float,
failing to touch the staircase formed by a thin white line.
While Baselitzs paintings become ever more cryptic and abstruse, Jumping Over My Shadow
places them with sculptures that strive for directness and legibility. Unlike the paintings and
drawings, which seem to melt away, the sculptures are anchored in an obdurate materiality. The
weight and solidity of bronze disguises itself in the dense matte black of charred wood: the
resulting formsskulls, legs like pieces of lumber in high heels, and a dancerclaim mythical
origins in their elemental simplicity.

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Josephine Meckseper - 10 Minutes After (Paris Show)

Gagosian Gallery (NY) 2016 ISBN 9781938748356 Acqn 26906
Hb 25x28cm 74pp 32col ills 42
Meckseper has devised an installation for the gallerys street-level vitrine, informed in part by
Walter Benjamins paradigmatic The Arcades Project. Looking into shop windows as he strolled
through the typical arcades of his city, Benjamin compiled sensations and quotations of midnineteenth century Paris that effectively blurred the historical distinctions between high and low
culture. In her window installation, Meckseper continues in this spirit, conflating items of art
history and consumer history, and underscoring the enduring mechanics of what Benjamin
termed exhibition value.
Large-scale canvas works, digitally manipulated to take on a paint-like texture, function as both
abstract compositions and contemporary readymades. Meckseper's paintings recall the lacerated
surfaces of affichiste poster works by Jacques Villegl and Mimmo Rotella, but here the
multilayered images are of fragmented street billboards that echo Benjamins influential essay
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. By both material and conceptual
means, Meckseper provokes the unsuspecting flneur to look more closely at the mechanisms of
capitalism and the paradoxes that reside in the ruins of today's consumer culture.
Text by James Frey.

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Nude - From Modigliani to Currin

Gagosian Gallery (NY) 2016 ISBN 9781938748363 Acqn 26907
Pb 26x33cm 190pp 90ills 75col 125
Nude: From Modigliani to Currin presents depictions of the human body from the eve of
modernism to the present day. From Paul Czannes Baigneurs (c. 189095) and Baigneurs
Debout (1876), and Edvard Munchs harrowing Madonna (189597) to Charles Rays Young Man
(2012), this exhibition considers the nude as an infinitely suggestive material and form.
The persistent impulse to depict the human body is present at every juncture in art history. In
Gagosians ongoing series of diverse and engaging group shows, such as Go Figure (2009),
Crash (2010), The Show is Over (2013), and In the Studio (2015), Nude: From Modigliani to
Currin is a lively and varied exploration, from the late nineteenth century into the present, of the
limitless ways in which the human body is both the subject and means of artistic endeavor.
Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Edvard Munch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mike Kelley, Takashi
Murakami, Louise Bourgeois, Martink Kippenberger, Francis Picabia, Glenn Brown, Yves Klein,
Pablo Picasso, Paul Czanne, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, John Currin, Roy Lichtenstein,
Charles Ray, Willem de Kooning, Ren Magritte, Jenny Saville, Marcel Duchamp, Aristide Maillol,
Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, Alberto Giacometti, Amedeo
Modigliani, Tom Wesselmann

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