Gagosian now represents Cy Gavin, a rising painter whose recent landscape paintings have aided in redefining the genre. In February, ahead of the formal representation deal, Gagosian mounted a solo show of Gavin’s new work in New York; the artist will have his next show at the gallery’s Rome space this fall.
In that last Gagosian show, working in a primarily abstract mode, Gavin focused on the recent relocation of his studio to the Hudson Valley, where he moved permanently in 2016.
Gagosian director Antwaun Sargent said in an interview that this body of work raises “questions that come out of a pondering of nature, his own relationship and the historical relationship to land, but then also questions of re-wilding that land and working with that land, and people’s connections to a land.”
In these large-scale canvases, Gavin’s painterly marks meld, blur, and fade into each other, coalescing into radiant images that hint at real places.
“He’s an unbelievable painter. I don’t know someone who can make landscapes as interesting as Cy Gavin can in this contemporary moment,” said Sargent.
Gavin is the tenth artist to join Gagosian’s roster in the past 12 months, and one of several artists to join because of Sargent. Among the artists that Sargent has brought on are Rick Lowe, Deana Lawson, and Derrick Adams. (In late 2021, Gavin had a solo show in London at rival mega-gallery David Zwirner, which led to speculation that he might join that gallery’s roster.)
When it comes to fast-expanding mega-gallery rosters, Gagosian’s is eclipsed only by Pace, which has added a dozen artists in roughly the same time period.
“What we’re trying to do is build a roster that has great artists, no matter what they are doing,” said Sargent, who joined the gallery in 2021.
Because his career, both as a writer and curator, has always placed an emphasis on highlighting and supporting contemporary Black artists, Sargent said these additions are simply a matter of “bringing my area of expertise to the gallery. So I think that’s why things seem to be moving at a clip, but, as we know, these artists have been around, and they have been making compelling work.”
Gavin was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 exhibition “The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night” at MASS MoCA. He had his first solo museum show in 2021 at Aspen Art Museum. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
Sargent said he was also interested in Gavin’s practice for the ways in which it “breaks from some of the contemporary conversation around what Black painters are, what they do, and how they’re supposed to respond in this moment. For me, the job at the gallery really has been about widening the conversation around what contemporary Black artistic production is and can be.”
He added, “These questions of Blackness, these questions of home, these questions of what it means to be in a space are all present in a Cy Gavin landscape.”