👻 Haunted Realism, Grosvenor Hill, London
👻 Haunted Realism, Grosvenor Hill, London
A preview of the art exhibit at the famous Gagosian Gallery
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“What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.”
—Mark Fisher
The famous Gagosian gallery is presenting a new exhibition that’s catching the attention of artists and fashion aficionados. It’s called Haunted Realism and features works of more than 30 artists around the globe including Meleko Mokgosi, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, and Tatiana Trouvé (take a moment to look up their stuff, it’s quite incroyable).
Haunted Realism is meant to be a reflection of hauntology, which was a term coined by Jacques Derrida in the 1993 book Specters of Marx. It characterized the tendency of Marxism to “haunt Western society from beyond the grave.” And this concept has been explored in broad cultural concepts, bringing to light historical overlap and disjunction, otherwise known as “the past inside the present.”
History of the Gagosian
Created in 1980 in Los Angeles, Larry Gagosian was able to establish a global gallery specializing in modern and contemporary art that now has 19 exhibitions across the US, Europe, and Asia. He was also at the forefront of digital galleries by developing one of the most innovative online galleries with today’s leading artists.
Gagosian started a publishing arm in 1986, which was seen as the first gallery to create a publishing house that produces a wide range of artworks. And today the gallery has published nearly 600 titles.
Haunted Realism
The gallery creates a sense that aspirations of modernity are now “lost futures” and can only be perceived as ghostlike traces of our original concepts. It confronts the accelerated flow of images by contemporary media culture and the obsession with “non-places” that we have begun to inhabit.
The artist also works to create a feeling that our “truths” can no longer be believed and even the future is now haunted by our volatile present. The point of Haunted Realism is to give us a view of how strange our present is, and how this was anticipated.
More from the Artists
Artists such as Chris Burden, Ed Ruscha, and Jim Shaw in Los Angeles have concerned themselves with cultural, social, and political forces in this new world. And the exemplify these worries in all of their pieces. The works of Rachel Whiteread and Tatiana Trouve allude to utopian philosophy and in Fisher’s work, he formulates neoliberalism as a global ideological system that has become impossible to imagine.
