THE STREET
Gagosian is pleased to announce “The Street”, an exhibition curated by Peter Doig.
November 1 – December 18, 2024
Featuring important loans from major institutional and private collections in the United States and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Tate, and the Rothko family collection, it presents paintings by Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Edward Burra, Vija Celmins, Prunella Clough, René Daniëls, Giorgio de Chirico, Beauford Delaney, Denzil Forrester, Jean Hélion, Satoshi Kojima, Lotte Maiwald, Mark Rothko, and Martin Wong, alongside major paintings by Doig himself.
First shown in Balthus’s debut solo exhibition in 1934, “The Street” depicts an actual location: the narrow Rue de Bourbon-le-Château, close to the artist’s studio in Paris. It is a painting that has fascinated Doig since he first saw it almost forty years ago. Balthus’s arrangement of curiously frozen figures in a complex perspectival space achieves, Doig notes, “a sense of timelessness, creating a space that is neither dream nor reality.” Anchoring the exhibition, it is flanked by Rothko’s dense New York cityscape, painted just a couple of years later (c. 1936), and Auerbach’s altar-like tribute to Arthur Rimbaud from 1975–76.
Streets painted from life converge with others created in the imagination, among them de Chirico’s The Delights of the Poet (1912). Bacon’s Jet of Water (1988) and Wong’s empty storefronts (1986 and 1988) portray derelict urban spaces, while the uncanny symmetries of Kojima’s Far away (2024)—echoed in Hélion’s Grande scene journalière (1948)—lead us below ground. Several paintings in the exhibition oscillate between interior and exterior spaces, from Beckmann’s Film Studio (1933) and Forrester’s Tribute to Winston Rose (1982) to the foreboding household appliances painted by Celmins (1964). The sense of danger and violence that they suggest erupts more fully in Burra’s Beelzebub (c. 1937) and Beckmann’s Hölle der Vögel (Birds’ Hell, 1937–38). A number of other paintings, by Clough (1980), Daniëls (1985), Delaney (1945–46), and Maiwald (2021), transform metropolitan subjects through innovative approaches to abstraction.
What all of the works share, for Doig, is an ability to surprise and disturb.