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Larry & Jasper’s Excellent Adventure

In the final show at Larry Gagosian’s premier gallery on the top floor of 980 Madison Avenue, the legendary dealer is closing out with an exhibition of Jasper Johns—the same artist who inaugurated the space more than three decades earlier.

Jasper Johns
Gagosian’s show delves into the many ways Jasper Johns was able to get such deep variations from relatively simple rules and patterns: Some of the works are stark black-and-white; others feature primary-color hash marks in red, yellow, and blue. Photo: Hans Namuth/Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Marion Maneker
January 23, 2026

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Last year, at Puck’s Art of Influence summit in New York, Larry Gagosian told me that he’d built his entire career on instinct rather than any grand strategy. In 1989, he opened his gallery on the top floor of 980 Madison Avenue with a show of Jasper Johns’s famous maps. Now, at the end of its 36-year run, Gagosian’s apex venue is closing with a show featuring Johns’s crosshatch paintings and drawings, from 1973 to 1983. Among them is a series based on a late Edvard Munch self-portrait called Between the Clock and the Bed, which rank as some of the most important of these works. Who knew Gagosian’s instincts leaned toward the sentimental?