Gagosian to Exhibit Sculptures by Duane Hanson, in Dialogue with Work by Other Artists
Mirrored Fiction Opens at the Gallery in Rome on February 11
Gagosian is pleased to announce Mirrored Fiction, an exhibition of sculptures by Duane Hanson, presented in dialogue with work in a variety of mediums by other artists including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Andreas Gursky, and Jeff Koons.
Mirrored Fiction invites a dialogue around realism and its contemporary afterlives—how the “real” is staged, witnessed, consumed, and distributed across bodies, images, and social spaces. While each artist approaches this subject from a distinct position, all of them are invested in the forms, representations, and materials of the everyday.
The exhibition is anchored by Duane Hanson’s hyperrealistic painted bronze sculptures of ordinary Americans. First produced in the context of a renewed interest in figuration sparked by the emergence of Pop art, these monuments to the prosaic test the boundary between reality and representation. Long associated with questions of social visibility, labor, and embodiment, Hanson’s sculptures act as both subjects of and witnesses to the viewer’s experience. Sometimes unflattering but still affectionate in their observational directness, they are familiar but poignant, often also resonating with sociopolitical themes.
In Hanson’s Window Washer (1984), a young man clad in grimy shorts, sneakers, and an unbuttoned short-sleeved shirt brandishes a squeegee, a plastic bucket at his feet. The work is part of an installation at the center of the gallery’s ovoid main space, with Gursky’s Politik II (Politics II) (2020) hanging on the wall behind it. In the photographer’s panoramic shot, a group of thirteen German politicians, including Angela Merkel, is arranged like the figures in da Vinci’s Last Supper (c. 1495–98). Within the depicted scene, a view of Ed Ruscha’s painting Five Past Eleven (1989), which juxtaposes a partial clock face with a bamboo pole, forms a backdrop to the gathering. The unexpected pairing embodies Hanson’s fascination with social class and Gursky’s exploration of the human systems that frame it.
Koons’s Donkey, from the Easyfun series (1999), a sheet of mirror polished stainless steel in the silhouetted shape of a cartoon animal head, extends the gallery’s visual plane while foregrounding desire, self-recognition, and consumption without reciprocity. Its outwardly lighthearted imagery suggests a child’s perspective while its reflective surface hints at a nascent process of self-discovery (and perhaps also, per psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, self-alienation). The work also responds to an explicitly narcissistic impulse—in Rome, it hangs opposite Hanson’s Bodybuilder (1989–90), a tanned, yet fatigued, shirtless figure in shorts with a sweaty-looking towel slung over one arm.