Live in Your Head: Richard Artschwager’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Gagosian presents Live in Your Head: Richard Artschwager’s Cabinet of Curiosities, an exhibition spanning the five decades of Artschwager’s career, and his first in London since 2003.

Live in Your Head was conceived specifically in response to the Davies Street gallery space, with its wide plate glass window giving on to a busy Mayfair thoroughfare. The installation will be visible from the street, its components arranged like objects in a Joseph Cornell box. It also recalls a sixteenth-century Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosity—a collection of specimens, relics, and other marvels that was displayed as a microcosm of its owner’s knowledge and experience. Artschwager studied science and mathematics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York before and after serving as an intelligence officer in the Second World War. In making art, he revealed an empirical fascination with artifacts both extraordinary and banal, deriving surreal results from everyday sources, whether through shifts in scale or transpositions of forms from one material to another.

The exhibition is named for a sculpture titled Live in Your Head (2002) that is itself a reference to Harald Szeemann’s paradigmatic 1969 group exhibition of the same title, in which Artschwager participated.