Gagosian Gallery’s upcoming group exhibition in London “The Show Is Over” features 35 artists, 34 of whom are male. That’s 97% male, a sausage fest! In fact, it’s 2% sausagier than the Met’s Modern Art section in 1989, according to the Guerrilla Girl’s “weenie count.”
That sort of gender disparity on behalf of the curator is too huge to go unnoticed.
“Dear Kim Gordon,” Postmasters Gallery’s Magda Sawon tweeted. “How much do you want to be in a show with 34 men. Just you. Maybe write a song about it.”
“It’s definitely strange,” Kim Gordon tweeted in response, adding, “Actually mark Francis is a really good and respected curator/im Totally surprised though… He claims to be surprised it ended up that way.”
The show is about the death of painting, sort of — “The show is over. Or is it? This exhibition is about abstraction and the end of painting, often proposed but never concluded.” — and will have paintings in it, but ironically, with “sufficient irony to suggest that painting itself, the spectacle that surrounds it, and the ultimate questions it poses about life and death, are never quite over.”
And that’s not a broad enough curatorial theme to include more than one woman, or as Kim Gordon concludes, “Apparently women and Nihilism [sic] just don’t go together.”
To be fair, the majority of the upcoming show’s artists have previously exhibited at Gagosian and that line-up has always been a sausage fest.
“The Show Is Over,” Dan Colen, Willem de Kooning, Jeff Elrod, Lucio Fontana, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Kim Gordon, Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Gregor Hildebrandt, Neil Jenney, Mike Kelley, Yves Klein, Roy Lichtenstein, Nate Lowman, Piero Manzoni, Brice Marden, Adam McEwen, Albert Oehlen, Steven Parrino, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Rudolf Stingel, Blair Thurman, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, and Richard Wright, Oct 15 – Nov 30, Gagosian Gallery, London
