To prioritize the safety of staff, artists and the public, Gagosian has temporarily closed its galleries around the world due to the covid-19 outbreak.
Duino Elegies is proposed as a collective exhibition that traces the resonance of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry through works of art spanning the last 150 years.
In 1912, Rilke was invited to stay at Castello di Duino, a fortress north of Trieste, Italy, by Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. There, while standing atop a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, he claimed to hear the following line: "Who, if I screamed, would hear me amidst angelic orders?" Eventually Rilke used these words to open Duino Elegies, a 1923 collection of ten deeply religious metaphysical poems. Concerned with the interplay of suffering and beauty in human existence, the Elegies also project a hopeful vision of a more peaceful world.
Two decades earlier, Rilke had moved to Paris to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin, initiating a complex but enduring friendship between the two men. Rilke revered the sculptor's ability to translate figurative feeling into figuration, as exemplified by Rodin's large bronze tragedian La Muse (1896). Originally conceived seven years earlier for the Monument to Victor Hugo – in which the muse, perched above the French literary giant, whispers inspiration for him – La Muse tragique is presented here as a single figure, evoking a sharp pathos befitting the symbolic identity of the subject.
In the 60s, a young Anselm Kiefer picked up a copy of Rilke's Rodin monograph, his first encounter with both of their works. Rilke's evocative prose allowed Kiefer to fully appreciate the work of the French sculptor, whose naturalistic touch and tendency toward the monumental would make him one of Kiefer's most enduring sources of inspiration. In two intimate 1974 artists' books and a series of sensual watercolors, Kiefer presents meditative and spiritual scenes that display his long-standing fascination with both sculptor and poet.
First born in 1893, Medardo Rosso's Bambino Ebreo (Jewish boy) has emerged as one of the most beloved motifs of the artist's late career. In an ongoing effort to portray complex emotion in the child's features, Rosso recreated and recast the sad portrait bust several times for numerous exhibitions and personal gifts. On display is a 1920–25 version of the Jewish Child made in plaster with a wax surface. Rosso employed wax – normally a preparatory medium – as a finish, exploiting its deadly connotations of impermanence and decay, as well as its approximation of the warmth and tenderness of human flesh – an impulse akin to Rilke's own musings on fleeting moments of contact with humanity with transients, sublime beauty.
Recalling his formative upbringing, Cy Twombly wrote, "It was impossible to walk out of Black Mountain College and not love Rilke." Building a direct and powerful link with the Elegies, Twombly Duino's painting (1967) marries the artist's geometric investigations with his constant interest in literature. To create this "chalkboard painting"—one of a group of works called to evoke the school wall—Twombly scrawled, erased and re-entered the name of Rilke's titular castle in white wax crayon on a ground of oil paint dark gray, posing the act of writing as an artistic gesture in itself.
For this exhibition, Edmund de Waal has produced a new work in dialogue with Twombly's painting, using the ceramic medium to improvise on the earlier artist's trademark handwritten canvases. The elegies diptych (2020) is made of brushed kaolin clay on a pair of wooden panels; over these chalky surfaces, de Waal scribbles literary fragments in graphite and oil sticks, partially smearing and overwriting them to simulate the mutability of observation. With its spiral script and pale ground, De Waal's graphic sculpture appears as an aesthetic opposite and creative tribute to Twombly's Duino.
The exhibition would also see works by Balthus, Paul Cézanne, Edmund de Waal, Anselm Kiefer, Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso and Cy Twombly, among others.
DUINO ELEGIES Gagosian New York
