Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood Premiers Arshile Gorky Exhibit
Presented at the Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood location, an Arshile Gorky exhibition entitled “Horizon West” opened to the public on February 21. The exhibit will run through April 25. The showing features never-before-exhibited works alongside paintings from the artist’s first solo museum show in August 1941 at the San Francisco Museum of Art (later SFMOMA), offering visitors a rare opportunity to study at close range the evolution of Gorky’s landscapes in response to his first-hand experience of America’s terrain.
In the summer of 1941, Gorky, his soon-to-be wife Agnes ‘Mougouch’ Magruder and Isamu Noguchi packed into Noguchi’s brand-new Ford station wagon and set out for Los Angeles from New York City. Their two-week road trip marked Gorky’s first visit to California and his first extended time away from the East Coast since arriving in America as an Armenian refugee in 1920.
Focused on the transformative impact of this journey, “Horizon West” presents a selection of Gorky’s landscapes from before, during and after the transcontinental trip, tracing the development of his incomparable approach to the genre.
Gorky’s “Tracking Down Guiltless Doves”As the exhibition’s title suggests, Gorky’s travels catalyzed shifting perspectives, both literal and psychological. By bringing the artist’s transcontinental road trip into focus, ‘Horizon West’ invites visitors into the eye and mind of a 20th-century visionary. It offers insight into what compelled Gorky to ‘look into the grass,’ toward the micro, the intimate and the worlds once lost to memory, where his observations of the physical landscape coalesced into an indelibly provocative visual cosmos.
On Wednesday, February 25, the gallery also presented a screening of the new film “Horizon West” by Cosima Spender and Valerio Bonelli. Comprised of original footage and archival material, ‘Horizon West’ traces Gorky’s transcontinental journey. Following the screening, the filmmakers will be in conversation with Saskia Spender, President of the Arshile Gorky Foundation and the artist’s granddaughter, and D.W. Moffet, Chair of the Film and Television Department at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah GA. Watch the film at the Hauser & Wirth website.
The exhibition will be open for viewing until Saturday, April 25. Admission is free.
Arshile Gorky (ca. 1904 – 1948) was born an ethnic Armenian in Khorkom, Van, Ottoman Empire. Fleeing the genocide that claimed the life of his mother, he immigrated to the United States as a teenage refugee in 1920. After four 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.
After a decade of working in New York, where he achieved a prominent position as a leading artist, Gorky initiated a series of studies and paintings observed from nature while on holiday in Connecticut first, and then over two summers at a farm in Virginia. Frequently returning to fragmentary and idealized elements of his early life, Gorky incorporated memories from his childhood as well as his adult fears and desires, among the reality of his surroundings
