The George Economou Collection is pleased to announce The Way We Live Now, its first contemporary group exhibition, with works culled solely from its holdings and the first of its kind within the exhibition program.
In 1875, the English novelist Anthony Trollope published The Way We Live Now, his devastating look at the transfiguring forces of power in an industrial era. A little over one hundred and fifty years later, artists, curators, and writers continue to mine the real world as a source of inspiration to talk about the effects that finance, industry, and desire have on artistic consciousness, and what effect being a member of contemporary society can and does have on artmaking in general.
Artists ranging from David Hockney to Lorna Simpson to Louise Bourgeois and Andy Robert invite us, with their unique sensibilities, to observe how they have been informed, if not shaped, by “the way we live now”—as political creatures, as humans longing for intimacy, as observers in and of the world that has made us.
On the first floor we look at Intimacy, where the soulful and impressionistic combine to describe how love and the romantic impulse can define an artist’s vision. What does the desire to connect with another human being look like? And how does that desire open the artist up to love’s possibilities while enlarging their view of the world? David Hammons’s witty, tender take on contemporary style is of a piece with Victor Man’s extraordinary painting of a young woman experiencing pleasure not too far from death. In these and other pieces, we see the body as a vulnerable universe rich in thought and emotion, separate from but no less a part of humankind.
On the second floor, the vulnerable body moves into the world of Politics. The artist looks at society as a whole and at particular contexts, and their place in it. Included here is Katharina Fritsch’s Hand (2000), which brings to mind the idea, even the reality, of brotherhood—the extending of one hand to another, sometimes as a gesture of inclusion, or not. In Louise Bourgeois’s monumental Toi et Moi (2002), the artist turns a mirror on the spectator; it’s a dialogue between perception and interpretation. Who are we as individuals, as members of society? And what does it mean to be led, or have freedom of choice? In his scintillating imagined portrait of the late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, the California-born and based Henry Taylor has given us a painting about a galvanizing force—a historic leader bent on change and protecting his politically vulnerable people.
James Baldwin once noted that when you find someone to laugh with, you find that there’s a lot to laugh about. Sometimes using humor as a tool, the artists in the last section of the exhibition, Being, look out at our world of bodies with a critical, mordant, and lyrical eye. Painters such as Lisa Brice and Jenny Saville explore energy as it affects or is generated by the female form, while Florian Krewer and Charles Ray have painted or created sculptural figures that look deeply into the joys of being together or existing in poignant isolation. Being ends where Intimacy began: in our desire to connect.
The Way We Live Now is co-curated by Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, educator, and contributing writer at The New Yorker; Ann Philbin, director emeritus of the Hammer Museum and 2025 Getty Prize Winner; in close collaboration with Skarlet Smatana, the director of the George Economou Collection.
A publication with contributions by Hilton Als, Lisa Brice, Heather Ive, Ben Okri and Charles Ray will accompany the exhibition.