Artist Spotlight
Spencer Sweeney has been a vital presence in the art, nightlife, and music scenes of New York for more than twenty years. In addition to making paintings, drawings, and collages characterized by infectious exuberance and raw materiality, Sweeney produces multimedia environments that transform gallery spaces into open workshops and performance stages. Combining the extemporaneous vigor of Neo-Expressionism with the knowing repetition of signature motifs, the artist’s portraits, self-portraits, and reclining nudes reverberate with references to both popular culture and art history.
Launched in 2020, Artist Spotlight is presented once a month as a regular part of the gallery’s programming. Each Artist Spotlight highlights a work by an individual artist—made available exclusively online for forty-eight hours—together with new editorial features and selected archival content.
Artist Spotlight: Spencer Sweeney features a new painting by the artist. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.
#GagosianSpotlight
Photo: Pete Sieper
Artist to Artist: Spencer Sweeney and Peter Doig
Peter Doig visits Spencer Sweeney’s studio and the two discuss automatism, ambiguity, and anguish in the creative process.
Shortlist
Mixtape: Spencer Sweeney
Spencer Sweeney shares a selection of songs that have punctuated his journey through the pandemic and ponders the expressive powers of a playlist.
In Conversation
Spencer Sweeney and Edek Bartz
Curator and concert promoter Edek Bartz speaks with the artist about portraiture, album covers, and subverting expectations.
In Conversation
Spencer Sweeney and Kembra Pfahler
Kembra Pfahler speaks with Sweeney about his work, staying inspired, and the relationship between self-portraiture and performance.
Related Exhibitions
Related News
Online Reading
Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney
Headz
The first volume of Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney: Headz is available for online reading from December 7 through January 5 as part of Artist Spotlight: Spencer Sweeney. Housed in a screenprinted box, this eighteen-volume collection brings together the vibrant and varied drawings made during HEADZ NYC—a weekly gathering of food, music, and creativity hosted by Urs Fischer, Spencer Sweeney, and Brendan Dugan between October 2017 and July 2018 in New York’s Chinatown. Interspersed among the artworks are photos of the participants and the space of creative collaboration they activated.
Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney: Headz (New York: Kiito-San, 2019)
Online Reading
Spencer Sweeney
Spencer Sweeney is available for online reading from December 7 to January 5 as part of Artist Spotlight: Spencer Sweeney. At over five hundred pages, this large volume showcases the multifaceted artist’s role as an indelible and essential part of New York City’s cultural landscape for over two decades. In addition to reproductions of hundreds of Sweeney’s colorful paintings, the book features conversations between the artist and some of his friends with long-standing roots in the city’s music and art scenes, including Larry Clark, Natasha Lyonne, Glenn O’Brien, and Kembra Pfahler, as well as archival photographs that capture both legendary and obscure moments from throughout his career.
Spencer Sweeney (New York: Kiito-San, 2015)
galleryplatform.la
Spencer Sweeney
Faces
September 24–30, 2020
Sometimes you find a convergent expression of joy and pain, almost in the same breath. This is what interests me.
—Spencer Sweeney
Gagosian is pleased to present paintings and works on paper by Spencer Sweeney online for galleryplatform.la. Curated from several existing bodies of work, the selection centers on the human face as a bearer of expression and a site for visual experimentation.
Sweeney’s paintings, drawings, and collages are alive with the same infectious energy as his multimedia environments, musical performances, and collaborative experiments. In the eight works on view, which were made between 2011 and 2020, the New York–based artist presents a vital and accessible take on the elemental formats of portrait and figure study, viewing them afresh through the mercurial lenses of popular culture and subjective experience. Inspired by the improvisational spirit of jazz, he produces intensely colored, boldly gestural images that reverberate with the amplified and distorted voices of art historical exemplars.
Spencer Sweeney in his studio, New York, 2020. Artwork © Spencer Sweeney. Photo: Pete Sieper
Museum Exhibitions
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Spencer Sweeney
Perfect
May 10–September 11, 2022
Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut
www.brantfoundation.org
Perfect traces Spencer Sweeney’s robust practice over the last few years, bringing together his psychologically rich figurative paintings and works on paper. The exhibition includes the artist’s large-scale variations on the nude in repose as well as a series of portraits that create a humorous and self-deprecating tableau of interior fantasies, insecurities, musings, and struggles involved in the creative process. Additional galleries feature announcement paintings centered around events, parties, and concerts that Sweeney helped organize as a vital presence in New York City’s nightlife and music scene.
Installation view, Spencer Sweeney: Perfect, Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut, May 10–September 11, 2022. Artwork © Spencer Sweeney
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Spencer Sweeney in
The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983–2004)
June 23–December 14, 2018
Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
ccs.bard.edu
The Conditions of Being Art examines the shared histories, art, and programming activities of two New York–based galleries—Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co.—by drawing upon the archives of each gallery to illuminate their distinctive curatorial practices, significant exhibitions, daily business activities, and social worlds. The exhibition includes work by more than forty artists who showed at or were associated with these galleries, including Spencer Sweeney.
Installation view, The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983–2004), Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, June 23–December 14, 2018. Artwork, left to right: © Kembra Pfahler, © John Waters, © Spencer Sweeney. Photo: Chris Kendall
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Spencer Sweeney in
Painter’s Painters: Gifts from Alex Katz
June 14–November 2, 2014
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
high.org
Painter’s Painters: Gifts from Alex Katz focuses on more than twenty artworks gifted to the High Museum’s growing permanent collection by Alex Katz and the Alex Katz Foundation. The presentation features paintings by thirteen emerging and mid-career artists based in New York, in addition to a selection of works by Katz himself. Work by Spencer Sweeney is included.
Installation view, Painter’s Painters: Gifts from Alex Katz, High Museum of Art, Atlanta,
June 14–November 2, 2014. Artwork, left to right: © Wilhelm Sasnal, © Spencer Sweeney, © Laura Owens
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That Was Then, This Is Now
June 22–October 5, 2008
MoMA PS1, New York
www.moma.org
Inspired by the artistic and sociopolitical climate of the late 1960s, this group exhibition features work by artists united by the desire to mobilize art as a means of change. Focusing on three iconographic themes—flags, weapons, and dreams—That Was Then, This Is Now places these representations as central to artists’ collective aspiration toward progress. Work by Chris Burden, Adam McEwen, Spencer Sweeney, and Andy Warhol is included.
Installation view, That Was Then, This Is Now, MoMA PS1, New York, June 22–October 5, 2008. Artwork, front: © Spencer Sweeney; back, left to right: © Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; © The Estate of Lovett/Codagnone; © Peter Hendrick; © Barbara Kruger. Photo: Matthew Septimus, courtesy MoMA PS1