The Extreme Present

Derrick Adams, Richard Artschwager, Andisheh Avini, Frank Benson, Lucas Blalock, Joe Bradley, Chris Burden, Julien Ceccaldi, Theresa Chromati, Douglas Coupland, Chelsea Culprit, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Gardar Eide Einarsson, David Ersser, Roe Ethridge, Urs Fischer, Nicholas Galanin, Theaster Gates, Isa Genzken, H. R. Giger, Samara Golden, Sayre Gomez, Douglas Gordon, Duane Hanson, Camille Henrot, Damien Hirst, Carsten Höller, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Josh Kline, Harmony Korine, Alicja Kwade, Deana Lawson, Austin Lee, Robert Longo, Goshka Macuga, Paul McCarthy, Adam McEwen, Cady Noland, Katja Novitskova, Albert Oehlen, Rudolf Polanszky, Tabor Robak, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, David Salle, Taryn Simon, Frances Stark, Diamond Stingily, Tavares Strachan, Moffat Takadiwa, Hank Willis Thomas, Kon Trubkovich, Daniel Turner, Andra Ursuta, Banks Violette, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, Anicka Yi

"The odd thing about right now is that people are more connected than they’ve ever been before—except that they’ve been tricked into thinking they’re isolated."

—The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present (2015)

Gagosian is pleased to announce The Extreme Present, the fifth in a series of annual exhibitions at the Moore Building in the Miami Design District during Art Basel in Miami Beach, presented by Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch.

This year, The Extreme Present will explore artists’ reactions to the conditions of our accelerating and increasingly complex world. The title is inspired by The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, a book by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, published in 2015. Their provocative thesis treats the rapidly evolving digital era, fifty years after Marshall McLuhan's groundbreaking study on the influence of technology on culture, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which he coined the phrase “the medium is the message.”

Works in this exhibition explore concepts of media, communication, togetherness and isolation. Theaster Gates’s tar paintings, their manufacture prompted by his inheritance of his own father’s tar kettle, unite the act of making a painting with the manual labor of making a roof. The abstract composition Torchdown (2014) conflates family history and memory with modern formalism. In Josh Kline’s Fox and Friends 3 (2019), a recolored American flag is wrapped around the casing of a television screen and mounted to the wall, evoking an inextricable bond and a perversion. Chris Burden’s Gold Bullets (2003) comprises ten gold-plated bullets in a Plexiglas vitrine, their deadly and chaotic potential neutralized. Adam McEwen’s life-sized Voting Booth (2017) is made entirely from machined graphite, suggesting a sketch, or the idea of the object, as well as the object itself.

Taryn Simon’s ongoing photographic series Black Square (2006–) sets selected objects, documents, and people within a black field that has precisely the same measurements as Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 Suprematist work of the same name. Here, a Zimbabwean billion-dollar bill, a blackened palm from the California wildfires, and an image of the pedestal that once supported a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in New Orleans all assume a new significance, suggesting the zero-sum game of humankind’s inventions and interventions. In Jeff Wall’s photograph Parent child (2018), a toddler's uninhibited behavior is juxtaposed with background passersby caught in mid-stride, creating an eerie scene that evokes some of Wall’s persistent themes: self-absorption, or the failure to connect. Deana Lawson’s photograph House of My Deceased Lover (2019) depicts a nude woman sitting at the head of an unmade, threadbare bed; despite her ramshackle surroundings, Lawson’s subject is regal and impervious, with the radiant look of one of the religious icons on the wall behind her. Similarly, Sayre Gomez’s photorealist painting of a roadside, Lakeview Memento Mori (2019), shows the signage for a strip mall and the siding of a graffiti and trash-strewn highway in the foreground, against a serene pink and gold-tinted sky.

The Extreme Present offers a compact history of our time, told through artists’ contributions that are both political and personal. In conjunction with the exhibition, copies of the book will be distributed free of charge to visitors.