Gagosian is pleased to announce The street, an exhibition curated by Peter Doig, opening November 1 at 980 Madison Avenue, New York. Taking as its point of departure Balthus’s remarkable 1933 painting of the same name, generously loaned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the exhibition is a portrait of urban life seen through the eyes of painters.

Featuring important loans from major institutional and private collections in the United States and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Tate, and the Rothko family collection, it presents paintings by Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Edward Burra, Vija Celmins, Prunella Clough, René Daniëls, Giorgio de Chirico, Beauford Delaney, Denzil Forrester, Jean Hélion, Satoshi Kojima, Lotte Maiwald, Mark Rothko, and Martin Wong, alongside major paintings by Doig himself.

After seeing his project at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris last year, I invited Peter to curate one of the final exhibitions for our 980 Madison Avenue gallery. It is one of several collaborations that we are discussing, and I am very excited to be working with this hugely important and influential artist in this unique way.

(Larry Gagosian)

This exhibition was born from more than a year of conversations and represents what is for me an exciting opportunity to present a selection of works by painters who I admire for their inventiveness and ability to surprise. Larry immediately recognized the potential for an exhibition informed by the eye of a painter, rather than a curator or gallerist, and is the ideal partner to bring it to fruition.

(Peter Doig)

First shown in Balthus’s debut solo exhibition in 1934, The Street depicts an actual location: the narrow Rue de Bourbon-le-Château, close to the artist’s studio in Paris. It is a painting that has fascinated Doig since he first saw it almost forty years ago. Balthus’s arrangement of curiously frozen figures in a complex perspectival space achieves, Doig notes, “a sense of timelessness, creating a space that is neither dream nor reality.” Anchoring the exhibition, it is flanked by Rothko's dense New York cityscape, painted just a couple of years later (c. 1936), and Auerbach’s altar-like tribute to Arthur Rimbaud from 1975–76.

Streets painted from life converge with others created in the imagination, among them de Chirico’s The delights of the poet (1912). Bacon’s Jet of water (1988) and Wong's empty storefronts (1986 and 1988) portray derelict urban spaces, while the uncanny symmetries of Kojima’s Far away (2024)—echoed in Hélion’s Grande scene journalière (1948)—lead us below ground. Several paintings in the exhibition oscillate between interior and exterior spaces, from Beckmann’s Film studio (1933) and Forrester’s Tribute to Winston Rose (1982) to the foreboding household appliances painted by Celmins (1964). The sense of danger and violence that they suggest erupts more fully in Burra’s Beelzebub (c. 1937) and Beckmann’s Hölle der Vögel (Birds’ hell, 1937–38). A number of other paintings, by Clough (1980), Daniëls (1985), Delaney (1945–46), and Maiwald (2021), transform metropolitan subjects through innovative approaches to abstraction. What all of the works share, for Doig, is an ability to surprise and disturb.

The exhibition also includes three major paintings by Doig himself. A recently completed 2024 work, Lions (Ghost), pictures two brawling lions in an interior that opens on to a coastal scene, with a palette that evokes both the Fauvist Mediterranean and Caribbean light. A selection of related drawings and painted studies are also on view, offering insight into the artist’s working process. Music shop (2019–23) depicts the calypsonian Shadow before the painted façade of an old shop in Port of Spain, in an homage to Trinidad’s musical culture. The earliest of the group, Night playground (1997–98), shows a New York street scene. It balances geometric structures with atmospheric hues and painterly incident, from the colorful patchwork of architecture and twilight orange skies to flashes of children’s movements broken up by the fence below.

The exhibition was curated together with Jasper Sharp and Parinaz Mogadassi, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with reflections by Doig on the exhibited works and a conversation between the artist and art historian Richard Shiff about Balthus’s The street.