Arshile Gorky: Lost Horizon / Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood
- LA Art Documents
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Arshile Gorky
Horizon West
Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, CA
February 21 - April 25, 2026
In the summer of 1941, Arshile Gorky, his soon-to-be wife Agnes ‘Mougouch’ Magruder and Isamu Noguchi packed into Noguchi’s brand-new Ford station wagon and set out for Los Angeles from New York City. Their two-week road trip marked Gorky’s first visit to California and his first extended time away from the East Coast since arriving in America as an Armenian refugee in 1920. Focused on the transformative impact of this journey, ‘Horizon West’ will present a selection of Gorky’s landscapes from before, during and after the transcontinental trip, tracing the development of his incomparable approach to the genre.
Gorky helped drive the shift toward abstraction in 20th-century American art, serving as a crucial bridge between the dreamlike imagery of surrealism and the later development of abstract expressionism. Synthesizing the legacies of art history and engaging the innovations of such contemporaries as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Willem de Kooning, he developed a wholly original visual vocabulary. The 1940s marked a period of intensified creativity for Gorky, sparked by his journey through the American West—an experience that prompted him to dramatically change his thinking and subject matter, particularly his intimate encounters with revelatory details: Mougouch recounted that when the trio arrived at the Grand Canyon, Gorky and Noguchi turned their backs on the immense vista, declaring it ‘too big to be interesting.’ Yet at a nearby Hopi reservation, Gorky was enthralled by handmade adobe ovens that reminded him of the clay stoves from his childhood in the Armenian Highlands. ‘We drove up to Big Sur,’ she recalled, ‘It was all so beautiful, but he wasn’t stunned—he only liked things he could get close to; he liked hills he could walk over.’
