Gagosian is pleased to announce |, an exhibition of new paintings by Sterling Ruby from the TURBINE series (2021–), opening at the gallery in Hong Kong on November 14, 2024. The title, |, is an ode to verticality. This exhibition marks not only ten years since the artist’s debut with Gagosian, but also a return to the site of that inaugural presentation.

In a practice that spans painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, video, ceramics, and textiles, Ruby alludes to key artistic tendencies and to the intersection of sociopolitical histories with the narrative of his own life. Through formal juxtaposition, he interweaves the disruption of aesthetic convention with the reexamination of civil structures. In Ruby’s 2014 exhibition VIVIDS, large-scale spray paintings seemed to gaze into the horizon in apparent anticipation of changes to come. Those works’ horizontal orientation stand in stark contrast to the precariously balanced compositions of the new TURBINE paintings on view in Hong Kong.

Ruby recalls the sensation of witnessing such monumental collapse as a child: “When I was young my father worked as an explosives technician. On a number of occasions, I went with him and watched, in real life, the collapse of large structures, the thinness of architecture, chimneys and smokestacks crumble in one sweep, one motion. Transforming solids to particulates. Watching these smokestacks, built on twentieth-century labor and progress, fall, I cannot help but think of societies’ and civilizations’ collapse.”

Opening reception: Thursday, November 14, 6–8pm

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

Gagosian is pleased to announce Social Abstraction, the second installment of a two-part exhibition curated by Antwaun Sargent. Following the presentation in Beverly Hills this summer, this iteration will be on view at the gallery in Hong Kong from September 10 to November 2, 2024. Social Abstraction in Hong Kong features new works by Kevin Beasley, Allana Clarke, Cy Gavin, Alteronce Gumby, Lauren Halsey, Kahlil Robert Irving, Devin B. Johnson, Rick Lowe, Eric N. Mack, Cameron Welch, and Amanda Williams—many of whom have never before exhibited in Asia.

Social Abstraction centers on experimental approaches taken by an intergenerational group of Black artists who use abstraction to address culture, perception, and our place in the universe. Working in a wide range of mediums—from oil and acrylic paint to ceramics, mosaic, resin, hair glue, wigs, and textiles—they move beyond exclusively formal considerations to engage with themes of identity, sociability, and lived experience. Curated by Antwaun Sargent

Opening reception: Tuesday, September 10, 6–8pm

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

Gagosian is pleased to announce Andy Warhol’s Long Shadow in Hong Kong, on view March 25–May 11, 2024, and coinciding with Art Basel Hong Kong. Organized for the gallery by Jessica Beck, formerly of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, the exhibition considers Warhol’s ongoing cultural impact by juxtaposing key paintings, photographs, and films by the artist with works by some of his contemporaries and successors, including Derrick Adams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Urs Fischer, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Alex Israel, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, and Zeng Fanzhi.

Warhol was one of the most prolific artists of the twentieth century, and his work’s staying power has been augmented by its enormous diversity. Over the course of four decades, he continually reinvented his practice, moving from his intimate drawings of the 1950s to iconic silkscreened Pop paintings of celebrities, consumer goods, and disasters in the 1960s; portraits of the social elite in the 1970s; and photographs, television shows, and collaborative projects in the 1980s. This heterogeneity has seen Warhol’s legacy inform and inspire numerous contemporary artists.

Opening reception: Monday, March 25, 6–8pm

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, Central

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition by Adam McEwen in Hong Kong comprising a cross section of his work, including new paintings as well as sculptures made in graphite, a material with which he is closely linked. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia, it will open on February 2.

McEwen’s practice tends to foreground and isolate banal objects—a yoga mat, a drinking fountain, plastic cups—to the degree that they become unstuck from their familiar, reassuring meanings. His sculptures in graphite or cast iron, for all intents and purposes straightforward and accurate renditions, suggest a sense of the uncanny and a feeling of slight displacement.

© Adam McEwen Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Opening reception: Friday, February 2, 6–8pm

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

Gagosian is pleased to announce Stirrings of a Polymorphous Bloom, American artist Alexandria Smith’s debut solo exhibition in Asia. Opening on November 16 in Hong Kong, the exhibition features new assemblage paintings and collage drawings that explore the protean nature of selfhood and identity.

The works in Stirrings of a Polymorphous Bloom envision cosmic environments inhabited by figures in flux. Smith’s practice is grounded in her exploratory drawings, represented in Hong Kong by works on paper housed in custom frames. From these, she develops boldly colored assemblage paintings that incorporate shapes made from painted wood and 3D-printed elements that rise from their surfaces and extend beyond their frames.

Smith’s new works focus on symbols of genesis, light, and growth, inspired by her interests in autobiography, fiction, and collective memory. Variously colored and ambiguously gendered, these hybrid figures emphasize features such as eyes, limbs, nipples, kneecaps, and nails. They stretch, divide, and multiply, embodying Smith’s multifaceted allegories of physical, spiritual, and emotional growth.

Opening reception: Thursday, November 16, 6–8pm

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

Gagosian is pleased to announce ABUNDANCE, an exhibition of new still-life and landscape paintings by Thomas Houseago. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery in Hong Kong, following Psychedelic Brothers – Drawn Paintings in 2016.

Abundance Paintings is a new body of work produced en plein air and in his new studio in Malibu, California, which reflects on cosmic and spiritual interconnectedness and the transcendental power of nature. The works’ titles and expressive imagery evoke ocean waves and the flora of Malibu at sunrise and sunset, with suns, moons, rocks, and skies rendered in vibrant color and undulating lines.

Houseago first achieved widespread recognition through his original and vigorous approach to the subject of the human body. Utilizing mediums associated with classical and modernist sculpture alongside less traditional materials like rebar and hemp, he builds monumental figures whose surfaces and structures reveal the processes of their making. In works on canvas and paper that he describes as a cross between “drawing and mapping,” Houseago also explores the emotional and spatial power of saturated color and dynamic form. ABUNDANCE sees him further extend this aspect of his practice.

Opening reception: Thursday, September 21, 6–8pm

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

Anselm Kiefer’s monumental body of work represents a microcosm of collective memory, visually encapsulating a broad range of cultural, literary, and philosophical allusions—from the Old and New Testaments, Kabbalah mysticism, Norse mythology and Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan.

Born during the closing months of World War II, Kiefer reflects upon Germany’s post-war identity and history, grappling with the national mythology of the Third Reich. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos. His boundless repertoire of imagery is paralleled only by the breadth of media palpable in his work.

Kiefer’s oeuvre encompasses paintings, vitrines, installations, artist books, and an array of works on paper such as drawings, watercolors, collages, and altered photographs. The physical elements of his practice—from lead, concrete, and glass to textiles, tree roots, and burned books—are as symbolically resonant as they are vast-ranging. By integrating, expanding, and regenerating imagery and techniques, he brings to light the importance of the sacred and spiritual, myth and memory.

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, Central

A painting is simply a screen between the producer and the spectator where both can look at the thought processes residing on the screen from different angles and points in time. It enables me to look at the residue of my thinking.
—Katharina Grosse

Widely known for her in situ paintings, in which explosive color is sprayed directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes, Katharina Grosse embraces the events and incidents that arise as she works, opening up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of the medium. Approaching painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity, she uses a spray gun, distancing the artistic act from the hand, and stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark.

Born in Freiberg im Breisgau, Germany, Grosse began painting at an early age, always attuned to the ways that color and light merged with thought itself. In her works on canvas from the 1990s, she juxtaposed colors of various densities and temperatures, repeating vertical, transparent brushstrokes. These led to related works painted directly onto the wall, where she lined hallways and staircases in sublime fields of artificial color. Introducing the spray gun as a painting tool, she began to paint across architectural interiors and exteriors. She produced her first work, a monochrome, using this technique at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in 1998, spray painting the upper corner of a gallery in a deep green that spread partially down two adjacent walls and onto the ceiling. In 2000 Grosse became a professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee; and she taught the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 2010–2018.

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

Gagosian is pleased to present Uncanny Valley, a group exhibition opening in Hong Kong on January 31, 2023. Organized by the Beijing-based independent curator Yang Zi, the exhibition features new works by Chinese artists Owen Fu, Jiang Cheng, Li Hei Di, Li Weiyi, Nabuqi, Song Yuanyuan, Su Yu-Xin, Wang Haiyang, Wang Xiaoqu, Wang Xingwei, and Zhang Zipiao.

The exhibition’s title is inspired by the theory of the “uncanny valley” proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. According to Mori, while a humanoid object that bears either a very high or very low level of resemblance to a real person will prompt feelings of affinity, one distinguished by a close but flawed similarity may instead provoke uneasiness and revulsion.

Uncanny Valley explores the emergence of these themes in contemporary paintings, sculptures, and videos by Chinese artists. These works endow the human figure with psychological, existential, and symbolic significance, combining an embodied intimacy with an intentional and specific lack of cohesion that stands apart from most art historical representations of the human form.

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

The simplest subjects are the immortal ones.
—Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Featuring nine works that span his career from the 1870s through the 1910s, the exhibition includes Impressionist landscapes and female figure paintings.

As a founder and principal figure of Impressionism, Renoir played a fundamental role in the group’s move from studio-based traditionalism to an art centered on modern life in and around Paris. Working in the open air, the Impressionists transcribed their sensory experience, rendering ephemeral effects of light through broken brushstrokes of saturated color. Bords de Seine à Argenteuil (c. 1881–82) pictures one of the Impressionists’ favorite sites in a town near Paris. Two stylishly dressed women on the banks of the Seine are integrated into a dynamic composition of boats, bridge, clouds, and water. Le Jardin d’essai à Alger (1881) emerged from the artist’s travels to Algiers. Representing the city’s botanical garden, it depicts palm fronds, vibrant sunlight, and dappled shadows in an allée occupied by promenading figures.

Opening reception: Tuesday, November 22, 6–8pm

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

Gagosian is pleased to present new paintings and works on paper by Mehdi Ghadyanloo. Opening on September 22, this will be his first solo exhibition in Asia.

Ghadyanloo’s paintings are composed with meticulous attention to geometry, color, and chiaroscuro. At once familiar and mysterious, the slides, tunnels, and ladders he depicts are sited in shallow rectilinear chambers. The scenes are illuminated from above by skylights, with painted beams of light that reveal the details of the plastic and metal structures while indicating different times of day. The pieces of playground equipment exist as symbols, monuments to psychological states, as much as they are imagined physical constructions. Absent of children or other figures, they have an enigmatic, monumental presence that prompts nostalgia for the innocence of childhood play while hinting at existential themes.

Ghadyanloo’s unique approach as a painter evolved as he completed over one hundred public murals across Tehran from 2004 through 2011. Created to beautify the urban environment and promote civic harmony, these expansive works transformed the face of the city and garnered international attention, leading to mural commissions in Europe and the United States. His return to painting on canvas has allowed him to advance other themes, inspiring the present body of work.

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

There are all these rules about openings in the body, about things leaking out. That’s interesting to me—the body out of control.
—Louise Bonnet

Gagosian is pleased to present Onslaught, an exhibition of new paintings by Louise Bonnet that coincides with her inclusion in The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, which opened on April 23. This is her first exhibition in Asia and comprises two groupings of three large canvases, displayed as triptychs.

In Onslaught, Bonnet focuses on corporeal fluids as objects of societal disgust, investigating art historical precedents for their depiction and considering the ways in which modern aesthetic and ideological conventions complicate the ways in which they are now received (“We are much more prudish about certain things now than people were in the 1500s,” she observes). The paintings explore our sense of mortification at our own bodies and the way they seem to betray us by leaking, sagging, or failing in various ways. “I’m interested in shame and the body in my paintings,” she states, “and bodily functions bring extra shame and embarrassment.”

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of ten new paintings by Jonas Wood, together with two sets of related drawings in Hong Kong this fall. This is Wood’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong.

The concept for the exhibition stemmed from the artist’s mid-career survey at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2019 when he reencountered Polka Dot Orchid (2015), a painting he had made of a single plant against a black background. The work was hung alongside other paintings of isolated plants in a room wallpapered with repeating tennis balls. Following that exhibition, and over the course of the lockdown period of 2020, Wood continued to consider the idea of making works on black grounds and the opportunity of hanging them together.

The new paintings continue Wood’s exploration into motifs of fruits, flowers, and houseplants. Depicting brilliantly hued orchids and succulents, full bunches of bananas, and a robust monstera plant, he uses plants as a vehicle to experiment with color and geometry, isolating the forms on monochromatic backgrounds to explore color theory, pattern, and line.

Opening reception: Friday, November 26, 6–8pm

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, Central

Space is made by an artist or architect; it is not found and packaged. It is made by thought.
—Donald Judd

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Donald Judd. One of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century, Judd produced visual and written work that still exercises an influence across disciplines. Starting out as a painter—as well as a prolific critic and essayist—he began making three-dimensional pieces in the early 1960s, aiming to purge his practice of the illusionism associated with painting and to distance it from grand philosophical statements. Toward the end of the decade, he became increasingly driven to install works permanently, beginning at 101 Spring Street, New York. In 1973, he began acquiring buildings in Marfa with the same principle in mind, also using them as sites in which to live and work.

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, Central

Gagosian is pleased to present Horizontals, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Mark Grotjahn from the Capri series (2016–).

In his paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Grotjahn interweaves various modes of abstraction, employing an expansive vocabulary of motifs and techniques that evolves between series, while infusing existing paradigms with new energy. Exploring color, perspective, seriality, and the sublime, he has drawn inspiration from a diverse history of nonrepresentational painting, from prehistoric to Op art. By incorporating complex and ever-changing modes of expression into an instantly recognizable aesthetic, he continues to develop an authorial gesture that is at once mercurial and entirely his own.

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central

Gagosian is pleased to present Hong Kong Exchange, an exhibition of works by some of the gallery’s most esteemed artists, most of whom have shown at the Hong Kong location, and some of whom will be exhibiting in the space for the first time.

New and recent works will be featured, including Ed Ruscha’s painting on paper TOWN TONE (2020) and Andreas Gursky’s large-scale photograph Hong Kong Shanghai Bank I (2020), a revisitation of his 1994 depiction of the same skyscraper. These compositions will be shown alongside key works of historical significance, such as Cy Twombly’s enigmatic oil painting Untitled (1957) and Nam June Paik’s iconic sculpture Bakelite Robot (2002).

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building

Gagosian is pleased to present cold mountain clay, an exhibition of new and recent works by Edmund de Waal.

A potter since childhood and an acclaimed writer, de Waal makes porcelain works that function as repositories of human memory and experience. Drawing equally from Eastern and Western traditions, de Waal’s works blend a minimalist visual language with invocations of the written word, positing the act of collection—of objects, texts, materials, and thoughts—as an artistic form.

The exhibition takes its title from the famed Cold Mountain poems, a series of verses by the monk Hanshan, who, according to legend, lived as a recluse on a Chinese mountaintop during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). Composed with diaristic frankness and intensity, the poems address the unavoidable passage of time and trace the introspective state that comes with monastic solitude.

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, Central

Gagosian is pleased to announce the first-ever exhibition in Hong Kong dedicated to work by contemporary Indigenous Australian artists. It is the third in a series of critically acclaimed exhibitions presented by the gallery, following New York and Los Angeles in 2019. Desert Painters of Australia: Two Generations is organized in collaboration with D’Lan Davidson, a leading Melbourne-based consultant in the Indigenous Australian art market.

Indigenous Australians constitute the longest surviving civilization in human history for more than 60,000 years. While affinities may be perceived between remote Indigenous Australian art and other modern art forms, the individual practices that are developed in relative isolation stem from the oldest continuous art traditions in the world.

This exhibition is designed to introduce the local audience for the first time to rare works by some of Australia’s most renowned Indigenous artists from remote regions of the continent. The intergenerational selection includes the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Makinti Napanangka, and Bill “Whiskey” Tjapaltjarri, and living artists such as Yukultji Napangati, George Tjungurrayi, and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri.

Gallery address: 7/F Pedder Building, Central