MAY 26, 2020

Photograph: Hauser & Wirth website 

This exhibition precedes The Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné, an invaluable web-based resource presenting the first definitive record of Gorky’s complete production. The first installment will launch in early 2021, followed by further sections in subsequent months. As well as a forthcoming exhibition of rarely seen works by Jack Whitten at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, and the 2020 reissue by Hauser & Wirth Publishers of the seminal collection of the artist’s writings, ‘Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed’ from 2018. 

Photograph: Hauser & Wirth website 

About Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky was born an ethnic Armenian in Ottoman Anatolia in c.1904. Fleeing the genocide that claimed the life of his mother, he emigrated to the United States as a teenage refugee in 1920. After five years with relatives in Massachusetts, Gorky moved to New York and changed his name in honor of the celebrated Russian poet. Refusing all categories, whether artistic or political, as necessarily reductive, Gorky forsook assimilation in favor of celebrating his otherness, becoming a central figure of the cultural milieu of a city on the brink of Modernism.

Photograph: Hauser & Wirth website 

About Jack Whitten

Born in Bessemer, Alabama in 1939, Jack Whitten is celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains. Although Whitten initially aligned with the New York circle of abstract expressionists active in the 1960s, his work gradually distanced from the movement’s aesthetic philosophy and formal concerns, focusing more intensely on the experimental aspects of process and technique that came to define his practice.