Gagosian’s Artist Spotlight to Feature New Sculpture by Edmund de Waal

NEW YORK, October 25, 2021—Gagosian's Artist Spotlight—an online series that focuses on an individual artist for one week each month—is pleased to present a new sculpture by #edmunddewaal. The featured work will be revealed at gagosian.com on October 29 and available exclusively online for forty-eight hours.

In his visual and literary works, de Waal uses objects as vehicles for narrative, emotion, and history. His installations of handmade porcelain vessels and other elements, often contained in minimalist structures, investigate themes of diaspora, memory, and materiality. Much of his practice is concerned with collecting and collections—how objects are brought together and dispersed—and with applying craft and placement to the physical and conceptual transformation of interior space. De Waal is also an acclaimed writer; he published the international bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes in 2010, and The White Road in 2015. His new book, Letters to Camondo, a sequence of imagined letters to the Count Moïse de Camondo, was published in April 2021.

Artist Spotlight: #edmunddewaal features a new sculpture by the artist, a wall-mounted vitrine that explores exile and revelation through the resonance of forms and their arrangement. Containing objects in various materials, de Waal's metal cabinet frames a composition that, while spare and elegant, alludes to the rich ideational complexities of shared and individual narratives. Continuing to investigate the quiet power of juxtaposition, de Waal establishes a tension between the vitrine and its contents, as well as between the objects themselves.
On October 27, a playlist selected by de Waal, featuring music he listens to in his studio, will be released on Gagosian's Spotify channel, and Gagosian Quarterly will publish a conversation between the artist and Richard Calvocoressi exploring the subjects of touch and representations of the human hand in art. Their conversation took place at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, England, earlier this year in the context of the exhibition The Human Touch.

The debut of this new work comes as de Waal is being celebrated by multiple international institutions: The Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris, recently opened Lettres à Camondo, de Waal's first solo exhibition in France and the first time a contemporary artist has been invited to create an exhibition for the museum; and the Jewish Museum, #newyork, will open The Hare with Amber Eyes—an exhibition derived from de Waal's memoir of the Ephrussi family, his ancestors on his father's side—on November 19.

Artist Spotlight is a dynamic platform that enables artists to present their work in the digital realm, sharing their stories with a global audience online. The series, which launched in April 2020 and is now in its third season, is presented once a month as a regular part of Gagosian's programming. Each installment highlights the work of an individual artist through new editorial features and archival content, and new work is made available with pricing information for forty-eight hours only.