Arshile Gorky
Horizon West
21 February – 25 April 2026
West Hollywood
Dates
21 February – 25 April 2026
In the summer of 1941, Arshile Gorky, his soon-to-be wife, Agnes ‘Mougouch’ Magruder, and Isamu Noguchi set out from New York City to Los Angeles in Noguchi’s brand-new Ford station wagon. Their legendary two-week road trip marked Gorky's first visit to California. Personally transformative, it was also his first extended time away from the East Coast since arriving in New York City in 1920 as a refugee fleeing from the Armenian genocide.
Focused on the influence of this pivotal journey, ‘Arshile Gorky. Horizon West’ will present a selection of Gorky’s landscapes from before and after the transcontinental trip, tracing the evolution of his incomparable approach to the genre: from, as it were, the moment Gorky and Noguchi ‘turned their backs’ on the Grand Canyon, declaring it too big to be interesting, to the fields of Virginia, where, in 1943, Gorky looked ‘into the grass.’ The exhibition will feature never-before-exhibited works alongside paintings from the artist’s first solo museum show in 1941 at the San Francisco Museum of Art (later SFMOMA), offering visitors a rare opportunity to examine the expansion of Gorky’s abstract landscapes in response to his first-hand experience of America’s terrain.
Untitled (Mojave)
1941 – 1942
About the Artist
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky was born an ethnic Armenian in Khorkom, Van, Ottoman Empire (present-day Türkiye) in c. 1904. Fleeing the genocide that claimed the life of his mother, he immigrated to the United States as a teenage refugee in 1920. After four years with relatives in Massachusetts, Gorky moved to New York and changed his name in honor of the celebrated Russian poet. Refusing all categories, whether artistic or political, as necessarily reductive, Gorky forsook assimilation in favor of celebrating his otherness, becoming a central figure of the cultural milieu of a city on the brink of Modernism.
After a decade of working in New York, where he achieved a prominent position as a leading artist, Gorky initiated a series of studies and paintings observed from nature while on holiday in Connecticut first, and then over two summers at a farm in Virginia. Frequently returning to fragmentary and idealized elements of his early life, Gorky incorporated memories from his childhood as well as his adult fears and desires, among the reality of his surroundings.
Current Exhibitions
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