About the Installation

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present Fall is Cancelled, a group exhibition featuring Georg Baselitz, Maurizio Cattelan, Jim Hodges, Mike Kelley, Robert Mapplethorpe, Calvin Marcus, Philippe Parreno, Ed Ruscha and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Fall is Cancelled unites a roster of international artists whose work engages with depictions of the natural world. Installations like Philippe Parreno’s Speech Bubbles, which forms a sort of cumulus cloud-like aerial landscape, or the seascape photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Wolfgang Tillmans, demonstrate the diversity of methods used to recreate recognizable yet surreal landscapes.

Imagery of animals, amphibians and arachnids further demonstrate how natural elements and living creatures are often disrupted through human contact. Mike Kelley’s acrylic on canvas painting, All Pink Inside, which portrays a small dissected frog resembling human anatomy to reference Courbet’s “The Origin of the World”, or Maurizio Cattelan’s taxidermized golden Labrador retrievers and chick, remind the viewer of the many ways in which humans alter reality for a mixture of personal or scientific purposes.

These various portrayals of nature throughout the exhibition create an unsettling and dystopic landscape of unique forms that conjure different ideas of human intervention. The exhibition’s title, inspired by a 2007 satirical article about global warming, “Fall Cancelled After 3 Billion Seasons,” reiterates this concept of human disruption throughout nature. Through painting, sculpture, photography and installation, Fall is Cancelled examines a multiplicity of forms of artistic expression that are utilized to challenge the viewer’s perceptions of nature and mankind’s place within it.