Untitled (Mojave) by Arshile Gorky, 1941–1942

In the summer of 1941, Arshile Gorky, his soon-to-be wife, Agnes ‘Mougouch’ Magruder, and Isamu Noguchi set out from New York City to Los Angeles in Noguchi’s brand-new Ford station wagon. Their legendary two-week road trip marked Gorky’s first visit to California. Personally transformative, it was also his first extended time away from the East Coast since arriving in New York City in 1920 as a refugee fleeing from the Armenian genocide.

Focused on the influence of this pivotal journey, ‘Arshile Gorky. Horizon West’ will present a selection of Gorky’s landscapes from before and after the transcontinental trip, tracing the evolution of his incomparable approach to the genre: from, as it were, the moment Gorky and Noguchi ‘turned their backs’ on the Grand Canyon, declaring it too big to be interesting, to the fields of Virginia, where, in 1943, Gorky looked ‘into the grass.’ The exhibition will feature never-before-exhibited works alongside paintings from the artist’s first solo museum show in 1941 at the San Francisco Museum of Art (later SFMOMA), offering visitors a rare opportunity to examine the expansion of Gorky’s abstract landscapes in response to his first-hand experience of America’s terrain.

Gallery hours Tuesday–Saturday, 11am–6pm