Few artists have cultivated as obsessive a following as Cady Noland. And yet one of the most momentous developments in recent Noland history has managed to fly under the radar until now. On Sept. 10, the artist will open a major exhibition of new work at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery in Chelsea (through Oct. 18).
The Washington, D.C.-born, New York-based sculptor gained considerable fame and success in the 1990s for making haunting works that transformed beer cans, gas grills, chain-link fences, and other mundane objects into monuments to, and totems of, the dark side of the American dream. But she is perhaps most famous for what came after her meteoric rise. In the early 2000s, Noland became a veritable cult figure when, amid skyrocketing demand, she stepped away from the spotlight and stopped exhibiting new work.
Now, it seems that with the upcoming Gagosian exhibition—announced, in true Noland fashion, just a week before the opening with very little detail—the artist is fully back in the game. The show will present new work by Noland alongside paintings by her friend, the late Steven Parrino, who created slashed, ripped, and torn monochromatic canvases before his death in 2005 from a motorcycle accident.
Just as Noland’s withdrawal from the art world was slow and steady, her return to the market has been equally incremental. It began with a small exhibition at New York’s Galerie Buchholz in 2021, which opened to little fanfare and coincided with the publication of a two-volume monograph. It continued in 2023 with a modest solo show at Gagosian’s storefront location Park & 75 on the Upper East Side. And it entered a new phase with a survey exhibition at Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland, last year, to which Noland contributed a new sculpture so late in the process that it was not included in the first version of the show’s checklist.
The choice to stage her comeback through commercial shows at Gagosian is especially notable considering that, according to Sarah Thornton’s 2014 book 33 Artists in 3 Acts, the gallery’s founder Larry Gagosian previously sought and failed to stage an exhibition of Noland’s work in the early 2010s. (In fact, Thornton reported that the artist threatened to shoot Gagosian if he went through with it back then.)
The Gagosian show coincides with the publication of a new book developed by the artist, Cady Noland: Polaroids 1986–2024. The 120-page volume compiles Polaroid photographs chronicling the development of her sculptures and exhibitions over the course of her career. Perhaps Noland is finally ready to let her fans peek behind the scenes and see all that she’s been up to—including what she’s kept hidden for the past quarter-century.
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