Screening Room: ‘Without Gorky’

On the occasion of the exhibition ‘Arshile Gorky. New York City’ at Hauser & Wirth Wooster Street, please join us for a screening of the documentary ‘Without Gorky’ directed by the artist’s granddaughter, Cosima Spender, at Hauser & Wirth 18th Street.

The film, produced by Peacock Pictures and the Arshile Gorky Foundation, explores Gorky’s personal and artistic legacy through the eyes of three generations – Agnes ‘Mougouch’ Gorky (his wife), Maro and Natasha Gorky (his daughters) and Cosima Spender (his granddaughter, the filmmaker). In addition to key interviews with Gorky’s family, archival photographs and artwork flesh out the story of the artist and the effects of his suicide.

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‘WITHOUT GORKY’
Directed by Cosima Spender
2011
1 hr 20 min

Introduced by Gorky Foundation President and the artist's granddaughter Saskia Spender

About ‘Arshile Gorky. New York City’
Hauser & Wirth presents 'Arshile Gork. New York City' at 134 Wooster Street. Through a selection of key paintings and several works on paper not seen since 1935, this exhibition will mark the centenary of Arshile Gorky’s arrival to New York City and subsequent reinvention as a celebrated artist and central figure of the American avant-garde.

About Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky was born an ethnic Armenian in Khorkom, Van, Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey) in c. 1904. Fleeing the genocide that claimed the life of his mother, he immigrated to the United States as a teenage refugee in 1920. After five years with relatives in Massachusetts, Gorky moved to New York and changed his name in honor of the celebrated Russian poet. Refusing all categories, whether artistic or political, as necessarily reductive, Gorky forsook assimilation in favor of celebrating his otherness, becoming a central figure of the cultural milieu of a city on the brink of Modernism.

After a decade of working in New York, where he achieved a prominent position as a leading artist, Gorky initiated a series of studies and paintings observed from nature while on holiday in Connecticut first, and then over two summers at a farm in Virginia. Frequently returning to fragmentary and idealized elements of his early life, Gorky incorporated memories from his childhood as well as his adult fears and desires, among the reality of his surroundings.