Gagosian has announced The Street, an exhibition conceived and curated by the artist Peter Doig, opening November 1 at 980 Madison Avenue, New York. For this collaboration with the gallery, Doig has assembled a personal selection of paintings by artists who have accompanied and informed his own artistic development.
Balthus, The Street, 1933. Oil on canvas, 76 3/4 x 94 1/2 inches (195 x 240 cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2024 Balthus/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.
Taking as its point of departure Balthus’s remarkable 1933 painting The Street, generously loaned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the exhibition will present scenes of urban life, labor, and architecture by artists including Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Vija Celmins, Prunella Clough, Giorgio de Chirico, Denzil Forrester, Jean Hélion, Mark Rothko, and Martin Wong, among others. The presentation will also include new work by Doig himself.
After seeing his project at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris last year, I invited Peter to curate one of the final exhibitions for our 980 Madison Avenue gallery. It is one of several collaborations that we are discussing, and I am very excited to be working with this hugely important and influential artist in this unique way.
—Larry Gagosian
Important loans have been secured from major institutional and private collections in the United States and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Rothko family collection, and Tate. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with reflections about each of the exhibited paintings written by Doig and a conversation with art historian Richard Shiff about Balthus’s The Street.
This exhibition was born from more than a year of conversations and represents what is for me, an exciting opportunity to present a selection of works by painters that I admire for their inventiveness and ability to surprise. Larry immediately recognized the potential for an exhibition informed by the eye of a painter, rather than a curator or gallerist, and is the ideal partner to bring it to fruition.
—Peter Doig