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Similarly, Richard Hamilton’s proto-Pop Hers is a Lush Situation and Francis Bacon’s Still Life, Broken Statue and Shadow each hinted at some of the postwar English developments that Ballard sought out in the era when Modernist abstraction was being codified as approved taste. A perfectly chosen Giorgio de Chirico painting ( Piazza d’Italia con Arianna), a late Delvaux ( Le Canapé Bleu), a single Man Ray photograph, and small etchings by Dali and Bellmer neatly covered the array of Surrealist inspiration in Ballard’s early stories and disaster fictions from the 1960s. One route through the rooms was to pick out those artists who strongly influenced Ballard. Without chronological sequencing or any discernable thematic organization (and with no wall-mounted labeling), viewers were forced into parsing this visual array with their own resources.
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It was impressive indeed to bring such major works together at such speed, many so patently and complexly in dialogue with Ballard’s work. These included major iconic pieces with a breathtaking range and depth: the Surrealists Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dali, and Paul Delvaux, the Pop Artists Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, and contemporary works by such international figures as Gerhard Richter and Damien Hirst. The catalogue listed another 170 individual paintings or photographs. The third room was darkened to allow the video projection of the Wilson sisters’ video piece, Proton Launchpad, and to let Mike Kelley’s glorious table-top resin sculptures (each called City and inspired by readings of Ballard’s The Crystal World ) glow in the half-light.
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The first room was centered on Richard Prince’s Elvis, a shell of a car mounted on a pedestal and it was possible to pass into the second room through Mike Nelson’s Triple Bluff Canyon installation, a constructed lobby space of studied and menacing banality, with a proliferation of false doors and fire exits. The sense of ambition was announced in the first found object encountered in the lobby, the life-size front undercarriage assembly of a Boeing 747, which forms part of Adam McEwen’s installation, Honda Team Facial. The entire space of Gagosian’s large gallery, located in an old industrial building near King’s Cross station, was given over to the exhibition, which filled a large lobby area and three substantial rooms. The exhibition had its highs and lows, mixing the expected and inspired in equal parts. In a crucial way, however, the Gagosian show has been the first to test how enduring Ballard’s reputation will be, how his extraordinary work will henceforth be framed, and how we will grasp the meanings of the adjective “Ballardian.” Public galleries have to plan years ahead, and small private galleries in a recession have to think about profits: Gagosian is a big enough brand to give six weeks over to a non-commercial show.Ī previous exhibition on Ballard and art, organized in 2008 at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona and titled “Autopsy of the New Millennium,” has already established Ballard’s importance to the visual arts. Ballard died in April 2009, and the speedy appearance of this exhibition shows both the depth of feeling in reaction to his death and the nimbleness of a powerful private gallery in opening up its space for this homage.
IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN J G BALLARD FULL
The show was organized with the full participation of Clare Walsh, Ballard’s surviving partner, and Fay and Bea Ballard, his daughters, and brought together the work of over fifty major artists. Ballard at their King’s Cross London space this spring (11 February - 1 April 2010). The leading private gallery Gagosian held an impressive exhibition in memory of the author J.G.