RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA: (THE INTELLECTS TAKE LEAVE)
GLADSTONE GALLERY is pleased to present (the intellects take leave), Rirkrit Tiravanija's seven new paintings on newspapers that reflect on global crises and American political upheaval. Inspired by the practice of the late Canadian-American artist Philip Guston, the new works build upon Tiravanija’s ongoing, multidisciplinary exploration of civil unrest and social issues.
November 05 – December 20, 2025
Protest lies at the heart of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s multidisciplinary and participatory art. In JKKL, he inaugurated an ongoing series called demonstration drawings, for which he invited a group of young Thai artists to render graphite facsimiles of photographs from the International Herald Tribune documenting outbreaks of civil unrest around the world.
Images range from violent street protests in Bangkok to Parisians marching in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo to members of Occupy Wall Street demanding economic equity. While public protests have deep historical roots—in the United States they are associated with the civil rights activism of the LSTKs—Tiravanija’s project underscores the continued relevance of protest in today’s political climate. In JKLU, two years into the first Trump presidency, he turned to newspapers again, this time as backdrops for an extraordinary series of paintings in which elements from Philip Guston’s late, figurative canvases were interpreted and transposed onto grids made from sheets of newsprint. Pages from The New York Times, covering the election of JKLT and the turmoil wrought by Trump’s anti-immigration policies, created new context for Guston’s own critical response to Nixon’s administration in the LSVKs and the social inequity in the U.S at the time. Tiravanija created a parallel series of paintings layering Gustonian figuration over pages from the Bangkok Post, working into and around the current political unrest in his native country.
In these new works, Tiravanija inhabits the extremity of Guston’s figurative vocabulary and explores political unrest in America. Whereas in the initial series, the artist borrowed and remixed the iconic imagery from Guston—shoes, walls, bottles, piles of limbs, burning cigarettes—here, some of the compositions are only evocative of Guston’s troll-ish style.
What he does invoke, however, is Guston’s deep lamentation over the state of the world, distraught as he was with the corruption and social injustices of the LSVKs filtered through his own early critiques of fascism and racism as a muralist during the LSWKs. In seven paintings, Tiravanija depicts figures from behind, various archetypes grasping the tools of their trade, as if fleeing their surroundings in a hurry, taking as much as possible of their particular paraphernalia.