The British painter Peter Doig, who left Michael Werner gallery last year after 23 years of representation, is joining forces with the US mega dealer Larry Gagosian to curate an exhibition in his gallery’s Madison Avenue space in November.
New paintings by Doig will be hung alongside historical and contemporary pieces loaned from major collections and institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), London’s Tate and the Rothko Family Collection. Gagosian declined to comment on whether he will be selling Doig’s work.
The painter has been outspoken about no longer wanting gallery representation, though his partnership with Gagosian appears to be ongoing. “It is one of several collaborations that we are discussing, and I am very excited to be working with this hugely important and influential artist in this unique way,” Gagosian says.
The dealer says the idea to invite Doig to curate one of the final exhibitions in his 980 Madison Avenue gallery came “after seeing his project at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris last year”. For that exhibition Doig selected works from the d’Orsay’s collection, which were then hung in a room adjacent to a gallery of his own paintings.
Balthus's The Street (1933) is the centrepiece of the Gagosian exhibition, which features some of Peter Doig’s favourite works Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York; © 2024 Balthus/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
Gagosian is due to leave Madison Avenue, one of his six New York locations, in the next few months as developers move in. At the centre of the Gagosian show, which opens on 1 November, is Balthus’s 1933 painting The Street, which has been loaned by MoMA. Doig has also selected works depicting scenes of urban life and architecture by Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Vija Celmins, Prunella Clough, Giorgio de Chirico, Denzil Forrester, Mark Rothko and Martin Wong, among others. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
According to Doig, the Gagosian exhibition was “born from more than a year of conversations and represents what is for me an exciting opportunity to present a selection of works by painters that I admire for their inventiveness and ability to surprise”. He adds: “Larry immediately recognised the potential for an exhibition informed by the eye of a painter, rather than a curator or gallerist, and is the ideal partner to bring it to fruition.”
In February 2023, when Doig left Werner, his wife, Parinaz Mogadassi, told The Art Newspaper that the relationship between artist and dealer was “a delicate balance” between the professional and personal. She added: “Ultimately, from an artist’s perspective, the best way to be assured transparency in all dealings, is to be the one directly leading the conversations surrounding one’s work and life. You have to also feel there is a sense of likemindedness.”
Speaking to the Guardian in early September, Doig called for more transparency in the art market, particularly when it comes to protecting vulnerable younger artists whose in-demand works can often be flipped by collectors. Since 2007, Doig’s paintings have achieved almost £380m in total, but he says he has barely made £230,000 from those sales.
Doig revealed that he had a “real row” recently with one of his former galleries after they refused to tell him who had bought his works. “I wasn’t after money,” he told the Guardian. “I wanted to know where the paintings had gone to. They said: ‘We can’t give you that information.’ I asked: ‘Can you at least tell me what you sold them for?’ and they refused that as well. The information is kept so secret, it’s infuriating.” He added: “In the contemporary art world, gallerists make secondary sales of your work. This happened to me quite a lot, I found out.”
Since parting ways with Werner, and without the intervention of a gallery, Doig has had a handful of successful institutional exhibitions, including at the Musée d’Orsay and the Courtauld Gallery in London. In both instances, he showed new works from his studio.
Gagosian has also pioneered his own unusual relationship with museums, borrowing works that are often difficult—and costly—to secure. Last year, for the exhibition A Foreigner Called Picasso, the dealer borrowed works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. For the 2024 Jean-Michel Basquiat show, Made on Market Street, Gagosian secured loans from the Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich and MoMA, among others.
• The Street, curated by Peter Doig, Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, 1 November-18 December