GROUP EXHIBITION

We might be at the end of our Rome.
—Ed Ruscha

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 organised 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.