Edmund De Waal “this must be the place”
Gagosian Gallery 24th Street
This event has ended.
Gagosian presents a major exhibition of new works by Edmund de Waal, this must be the place.
The exhibition is the internationally acclaimed artist and writer’s first with Gagosian in New York in a decade and follows elective affinities at the Frick Collection, New York (2019), and The Hare with Amber Eyes at the Jewish Museum, New York (2021–22), which presented different aspects of his wide-ranging practice.
this must be the place features wheel-thrown porcelain vessels, both black and white, presented in wall-mounted vitrines. De Waal juxtaposes the cylindrical vessels and bowls with fine porcelain tiles, blocks of steel, silver, and stone, some of which are inscribed with handwritten text. In their compositions and spacing, these arrangements recall books on a shelf, stanzas of poems, or the notes and rests of musical notation.
De Waal relates: “For the last two years my studio has been full of silver, steel, marble, and porcelain. This new body of work is about place—where things come from, where they belong, what we remember and pass on. The materials echo places. I use porcelain clay from Limoges but turn it black with oxides and inscribe it with remembered poetry. I use marble from Kilkenny and push folded sheets of silver into crevices like prayers into a wall. The work is full of fragments, scraps of silver on the rims of bowls, poems, music, echoes of people that matter to me and the places where they lived. These sculptures are new places.”
In this must be the place, de Waal engages with materiality, memory, and diaspora. Titled with allusions to verses by John Milton and Wallace Stevens, the vertical black vitrines contain dark porcelain vessels placed alongside tiles and blocks of silver, marble, and Cor-Ten steel. Dedicated to Emily Dickinson, six Letters to Amherst works (2023) include compositions in primarily unglazed porcelain, gold leaf, and alabaster arrayed within horizontal white vitrines.
De Waal has also made new stone benches carved from Kilkenny marble, a fine-grained sedimentary rock. These monolithic benches incorporate silver, inscribed, folded like sheets of paper, and embedded in the surface of the benches, echoing the ritual placement of written prayers into Jerusalem’s Western Wall.
this must be the place is complemented by the presentation of to light, and then return— at Gagosian’s gallery at 976 Madison Avenue, New York, from September 14 to October 28, 2023. This exhibition features sculptures by de Waal and platinum prints and tintypes by Sally Mann that each artist created in response to the other’s work.
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Schedule
from September 13, 2023 to October 28, 2023