Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (about 1904–1948), a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American art. This exhibition, which includes about 180 works of art, surveys Gorky’s entire career from the early 1920s until his death by suicide in 1948. The retrospective includes paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings—some of which are being shown for the first time—and reveals Gorky’s development as an artist and the evolution of his singular visual vocabulary and mature painting style.

The highlight of the exhibition is a series of “creation chambers,” based on the artist’s description of his studio in Union Square, New York, in which some of Gorky’s most powerful and best-known paintings are being shown alongside their related studies and preparatory drawings. Benefiting from new biographical information that has come to light in recent years, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will present a critical reassessment of this key figure in modern art. This comprehensive retrospective is the first full-scale survey of Gorky’s work in nearly thirty years, thus providing a new generation of viewers with the opportunity to see this complex, influential, and deeply moving body of work.

Curator

Michael Taylor • The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art

Location

Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, first floor

Itinerary

Philadelphia Museum of Art • October 2009 - January 2010
Tate Modern, London • Spring 2010
Los Angeles County Museum of Art • Summer 2010