Gagosian recently lifted the veil on a new exhibition titled “Beginning” at its Beverly Hills location. Curated by Italian curator and writer Francesco Bonami, “The exhibition is about walking, crossing, looking, sleeping, fearing, and dying,” he said in a statement, adding that “it also reminds us that every time we walk, cross, look, sleep, fear, or die, we have the chance to begin again.”
Through a series of paintings, installations and photography by Maurizio Cattelan, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Richard Prince, and Rudolf Stingel, “Beginning” investigates the impact of recent traumatic global events on our collective perception of art and culture as a way to also offer a chance for rebirth.
Inspired by a 1994 exhibition Stingel and Gonzalez-Torres worked on together at the Neue Galerie Graz in Austria, the Gagosian show is rooted in both mourning, as much as it is in an unflinching sense of hope in the face of death and disaster.
Visitors are first invited to enter through Gonzalez-Torres’ beaded jade curtain Untitled (Beginning) (1994), which reveals a massive mural by Cattelan dubbed Father (2021). The latter work makes reference to a range of topics — from the Italian artist’s own experiences with his parent, Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1483), an image of the feet of a deceased Che Guevarra, to an earlier sculpture by Cattelan, Daddy, Daddy (2008), which depicts Pinnochio facedown in a fountain at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda as part of the exhibition “theanyspacewhatever” (2008–09).
The sculpture depicted a hero that had fallen to his death, with any cry for help having gone unheeded. In a statement by Gagosian, Father similarly “conveys Hamlet’s ultimate dilemma — “to die, to sleep” — a choice between the avoidance of violent reality and the risk of succumbing to it.”
The group exhibition is currently on view in Los Angeles and will end on June 4.
In case you missed it, an elderly woman stole and altered a jacket artwork from the Musée Picasso.
Gagosian
456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills, ca 90210
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