This September, Hauser & Wirth will celebrate the centenary of Arshile Gorky’s arrival in New York City with a special exhibition at its space on Wooster Street, mere blocks from the artist’s original West Village address. Arshile Gorky. New York City will present paintings and works on paper, many not seen since 1935, that spotlight the master’s development of an artistic language that ultimately would be as singular—and consequential—as the American city that was his home.
The centenary of Gorky’s move to New York City will also be marked by focused presentations at museums in New York and beyond, including at The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
About the Exhibition
Through Gorky’s prescient and deliberate rejection of originality, his work in the United States began by reflecting—and often outright quoting—the diversity of these artists as well as the cityscape of Manhattan.
Gorky primarily learned how to draw and paint through visits to local museums and galleries, and by immersing himself in art books and magazines. Drawing upon the visual vocabularies of cubism and surrealism, he linked European styles with the signals he was finding within the work of other New York-based artists and the city itself.
Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition includes works from several of Gorky’s series, including ‘Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia’ (1930-1936), ‘Organization’ (1933-1937) and ‘Image in Khorkom’ (1936-1939), that encapsulate Gorky’s early efforts to refine a style that in its appropriation of various movements became, paradoxically, a vehicle for self-expression. As Gorky’s stature in New York’s art scene grew, he was increasingly inspired by, first and foremost, cubism and the mechanomorphic forms associated with Dada, surrealism and the works of Francis Picabia and Jean (Hans) Arp. For instance, in the ‘Organization’ series, he fused mechanical lines and circuitry with rhythmic curves and ovoid shapes of varying density to depict the traditional subject of an artist at work in a studio. So, too, with ‘Untitled (Still Life on Table)’ (c. 1936–37), in which thickly painted black lines— simultaneously organic and rigid—carry on the long history of the genre. While in the ‘Khorkom’ series—his only works explicitly named after the village in a predominantly Armenian province of the Ottoman Empire where he was born—Gorky finessed his style, purging mimetic references and more traditional subjects in favor of personal imagery, however camouflaged. Gorky’s loose, improvisational mode of repeating motifs would reappear across different eras and genres of creation.
A new installment of the ‘Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné’ will be made available in conjunction with this exhibition, while a contextual publication, edited by Ben Eastham, will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in early 2025. Combining scholarly research to illuminate the formal influence of New York on Gorky’s body of work with more literary reflections on his status as an immigrant artist, as well as situating his work within the wider social and political milieux, this publication aims to revisit and update understanding of the artist.
About the Artist
Arshile Gorky was born an ethnic Armenian in Khorkom, Van, Ottoman Empire (present-day Türkiye) in c. 1904. Fleeing the genocide that claimed the life of his mother, he immigrated to the United States as a teenage refugee in 1920. After four years with relatives in Massachusetts, Gorky moved to New York and changed his name in honor of the celebrated Russian poet Maxim Gorky. Refusing all categories, whether artistic or political, as necessarily reductive, Gorky forsook assimilation in favor of celebrating his otherness, becoming a central figure of the cultural milieu of a city on the brink of modernism.
