Press release
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february 11, 2022 - Gagosian Gallery
Gagosian Athens Presents “Ruins and Fragments,” Bringing Together Three Generations of Local, Regional, and International Artists
ATHENS, February 10, 2022—Gagosian is pleased to present a group exhibition that brings together richly varied works by international, regional, and local artists that reflect on the poetic power of ruins and fragments—in the city of Athens, a thriving contemporary metropolis charged with the traces of ancient histories. For some of these artists, this will be the first time that their work will be seen in Greece. Ruins and Fragments is organized by Louise Neri and Christina Papadopoulou.
Architecture, sculpture, and material culture in states either ruined or incomplete stimulate the mind to imagine what might have been, or could be, in the elusive human quest for certainty and completeness. Ed Ruscha is drawn to desolate and melancholy places, to voids both physical and spiritual. Throughout his career, he has found countless new ways to depict these landscapes with “no past—just what passes for a future.” In the Metro Mattress paintings (2015), working in acrylic on paper, he depicts derelict bedding and wrecked box springs, discarded on the streets of Los Angeles, isolated in empty white space. These unlikely characters slump and sag with age, their rips and stains attesting to the bare life they once supported. For Rena Papaspyrou, the city of Athens is a perpetual site of experimentation as well as the material and conceptual source of her art. In works such as Image through Matter and Geography (Images through Matter) (both 1981), she removed the cutaneous layer of wall segments and modified them with pencil or marker, reconstituting them as autonomous artworks that possess the visual complexity of maps or abstract paintings, wherein the viewer can discover images ingrained in surfaces by the actions of time.
For the Brick Reliquaries (2020), Theaster Gates experimented in his Chicago studio with the breaking point of clay. These elemental wall reliefs, made with raw bricks and manganese, were fired to a temperature far in excess of the usual limits. In the process, the material begins to buckle and collapse, its known properties transforming into the mysteries of heat-based sculpture. Finding alternative creative possibilities in the cast-offs of the studio, Cristina Iglesias builds schematic models from cardboard and other refuse, photographs them, and then scales the images up into haunting mental architectures silkscreened onto gleaming copper panels.
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