Ben Eastham
Eric Piasecki
Jane DeBevoise
Peter Drake
Ben Eastham is a writer and editor based in London. He is founding editor and publisher of The White Review and associate editor of ArtReview. He was an associate editor of the documenta 14 magazine, and his writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Frieze, Mousse, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere.
Eric Piasecki is a photographer based between Santa Fe and New York. His work has been extensively published in leading shelter magazines including Architectural Digest and Elle Decor, as well as in monographs for many top architects and designers. Upcoming titles include Atmosphere by designer Steven Gambrel and A Place to Call Home by architect Gil Schafer.
Jane DeBevoise is Chair of the Board of Directors of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong and New York. Before moving to Hong Kong in 2002, Ms. DeBevoise was Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum, responsible for museum operations and exhibitions globally. She joined the museum in 1996 as Project Director of China: 5000 Years (1998), an exhibition of traditional and modern Chinese art.
Peter Drake is a visual artist and the Provost of the New York Academy of Art, a progressive figurative and representational graduate program in New York City. Drake actively exhibits, lectures, curates, serves as a Board Member for the Artist’s Fellowship, Inc., and is a jurist for Base Istanbul and the XL Catlin Art Prize. In spring 2018 he co-curated Figurative Diaspora with Mark Tansey.
Dan Colen
Takashi Murakami
Dan Colen’s paintings continually investigate to what extent art comes from the artist and to what extent it arises from forces independent of the artist. His work is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens, Greece; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Jimenez-Colon Collection, Ponce, Puerto Rico; and more. An exhibition of his work was recently on view at the Newport Street Gallery, London. In this issue we visit the artist’s studio and preview the Desert series. Photo by Eric Piasecki
Takashi Murakami earned a PhD from the Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Fine Arts. He began exhibiting while still at the university, and in 1996 established the Hiropon Factory studio (today Kaikai Kiki). In addition to the production and marketing of Murakami’s art and related work, Kaikai Kiki functions as a supportive environment for the fostering of emerging artists. With the curation of the 2000 Superflat exhibition, Murakami advanced the Superflat theory of Japanese art. He has exhibited widely both in Japan and overseas.
Michael Slenske
Virginia Shore
Virgil Abloh
Vitaly Komar
Xin Wang
Michael Slenske is a LA-based writer and editor. He has served as the editor-at-large of CULTURED and LALA and as a contributing editor at Modern Painters and Art + Auction. His work has been anthologized, included in numerous artist monographs, and appears in WSJ., Architectural Digest, W, Wallpaper*, and DesignLA. Photo by Steven Perilloux
Virginia Shore is an art curator, advisor, and advocate living in Washington DC. She is currently collaborating with the Emerson Collective, Halcyon Arts Lab, and the Hall Group on public art projects. Previously, Ms. Shore was the Chief Curator of the US Department of State's Arts in Embassies (AIE) Program.
Virgil Abloh was born in 1980 in Rockford, Illinois. After earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he completed a master’s degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Abloh’s experience has spanned varying platforms over the past two decades. In the year 2016, he curated an exhibition of works (“free cubes,” “material table,” and “trivision sign”) from his furniture collection for Design Miami at Art Basel. 2013 marked the inception of a Milan-based clothing line entitled Off-White, for which he was awarded the British Fashion Council’s Urban Luxe award in 2017. This past spring he was appointed artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton. In 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, will hold a retrospective of his work, curated by Michael Darling. Photo by Koichiro Matsui ©︎ Virgil Abloh and ©︎ Takashi Murakami
Vitaly Komar, like his creative partner Alexander Melamid, is a Moscowborn artist who emigrated to New York in 1978. Komar is one of the founders of the Sots Art movement of the 1970s and ’80s, which is considered the USSR’s answer to Pop art. Their work used the iconography and propaganda symbols of Soviet Russia to deconstruct and explode established myth.
Xin Wang is an art historian, curator, and art critic based in New York. Her writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and publications such as E-flux, Artforum, Rhizome, Kaleidoscope, Art in America, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, and Leap. She is currently pursuing a PhD in modern and contemporary art at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.
Jeff Wall
Mark Tansey
Wyatt Allgeier
Derek Blasberg
Mark Tansey was born in 1949 in San Jose, California, and received his BA in 1972 from the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles. He completed his graduate studies in painting from 1975 to 1978 at Hunter College, New York. Tansey’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions. He currently lives and works in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and New York City. In this issue Tansey participates in a roundtable discussion about the 1994 exhibition he hosted called Transformations as well as Figurative Diaspora, the recent exhibition he co-curated with Peter Drake of the New York Academy of Art. Photo by DPA Picture Alliance Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
Wyatt Allgeier is a writer and an editor for the Gagosian Quarterly. He obtained a degree in studio art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before moving to New York City to complete MoMA PS1’s Summer School program with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in 2012. He is currently working on a collection of poetry. Photo by Brian Gilmartin
Derek Blasberg is a writer, editor, and New York Times best-selling author. In addition to being the Executive Editor of Gagosian Quarterly, he is Vanity Fair’s “Our Man on the Street” and the host of the television show CNN Style. Photo by Pier Guido Grassano
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Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Tate Modern (2005), the Museum of Modern Art, New York/Art Institute of Chicago/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007), and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam/Kunsthaus Bregenz (2014). A major exhibition of his work at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany, will be on view June 2– September 9, 2018. Photo by Miro Kuzmanovic
Alexander Wolf Alexander Wolf has written for Modern Painters, Art in America, The Last Magazine, and The New Republic. He joined Gagosian New York in 2013 and has recently written on Mark Tansey and Robert Therrien. For this issue, Wolf discusses the work of Nam June Paik.
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