Is Abstract Art Over? Review of Gagosian’s Frieze Week Exhibitions
- Martina Campagnoli
- Oct 15
- 3 min read
Martina Campagnoli
In time for Frieze Week 2025, Gagosian’s three London galleries — Burlington Arcade, Grosvenor Hill, and Davies Street — have mounted a coordinated effort to command attention. Yet despite the scale, what is on offer feels more like repetition than revelation. Abstraction, as presented here, reads less like reinvention and more like a remix.
Brice Marden: Etched Letters, Burlington Arcade
The Burlington Arcade exhibition showcases 17 works by Brice Marden — his first gallery presentation of etchings in London. Inspired by Chinese calligraphy Marden encountered during a trip to Taipei; these Letter works construct an imagined and purely pictorial alphabet. For Marden, the calligraphic gesture becomes a formal artistic exercise rather than a linguistic or cultural inquiry.
This constructed alphabet, however, is not new territory. Henri Michaux’s mescaline drawings from the 1950s explored the unconscious potential of language through invented scripts — not merely as aesthetic forms, but as direct conduits to altered mental states. In comparison, Marden’s lines lack psychological depth or urgency.
Marden’s process, often mythologized as deeply personal, draws heavily from these precedents without acknowledging their complexity. While visually striking, the referencing of Chinese calligraphy becomes yet another example of the Westernization of traditional practices. Does Marden engage with the philosophy and history behind the brushstrokes, or simply borrow their formal elegance?
Christopher Wool, Gagosian Grosvenor Hill
At Grosvenor Hill, Christopher Wool presents 65 works across the gallery’s expansive white walls. The scale is imposing, yet the content feels oddly weightless. Wool is described as “engaging with the limits of abstraction”, but where exactly are those limits being tested?
Wool’s method of layering media — from silkscreen to oil paint to industrial spray guns — aims to engineer unpredictability. The resulting surfaces are textured, chaotic, and occasionally compelling, but they appear more the product of material collision than conceptual interrogation. Wool relinquishes control to process, but this embrace of randomness is hardly avant-garde.
We’ve seen this before: in the dripping canvases of Jackson Pollock, the impasto and grattage of Jean Dubuffet, and most notably in Jean Fautrier’s Hostages series. Compared to Fautrier’s emotionally charged materiality where violence, abstraction and corporeality converge, Wool’s surfaces feel clean, distant and even antiseptic.
The question lingers: is surrendering to material accident still a radical gesture in 2025?
Wool’s sculptural work, by contrast, offers more presence. His steel wire sculptures assert themselves against the bright white cube and hold visual interest with one exception. Muscle, a cast-iron sculpture placed awkwardly on a pedestal in a corner of Gallery 2, feels like a misstep. Small, phallic, and oddly vulgar, it is disconnected from the surrounding works. The placement, the scale, and the object itself lend the piece a pathetic quality almost inviting pity.
Ed Ruscha: Says I, to Myself, Says I, Davies Street
At Gagosian Davies Street, Ed Ruscha presents his first London gallery exhibition of paintings on unprimed linen. Ruscha has been working with raw linen since the 1990s, and this show offers little if no development from his previous works. Ten text-based paintings hang neatly, bearing words like “NOW,” “NEW,” and “HEY,” rendered in serif fonts against the textured neutrality of linen.
Yes, they’re elegant. Yes, they look good on the wall. But is that enough?
Ruscha’s works walk a thin line between wry and decorative. In fact, his 2023 design for The Beatles’ final single Now and Then — featuring a diagonal serif font over a fabric-like blue background — is nearly indistinguishable from the works on view here. To claim, as the gallery does, that these paintings “emphasize the definition and potential” of language feels disingenuous when the chosen words are so deliberately emptied of context.
At this point, Ruscha’s text paintings function less as conceptual gestures and more as luxury décor. You could imagine them, unironically, in the home accessories section of a department store. That Gagosian presents this as a major moment in contemporary abstraction is both telling and troubling.
Gagosian’s trio of exhibitions plays like a greatest hits album of abstraction: polished, predictable, and risk-free. Marden, Wool, and Ruscha —once hailed as experimenters — are now institutional fixtures, operating comfortably within familiar frameworks. There is comfort here, yes, but little urgency.
So, is abstract art over? Not necessarily. But if this trio of exhibitions represents the best that one of the world’s leading galleries has to offer, we might fairly ask: has it simply stopped trying?
