first time my father overheard me listening to
this bit of music he asked me,
what is it?
it’s called Love For Three Oranges,
I informed him.
boy, he said, that’s getting it
cheap.
he meant sex.
listening to it
I always imagined three oranges
sitting there,
you know how orange they can
get,
so mightily orange.
–from Charles Bukowski, Three Oranges

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce Love for Three Oranges, a group exhibition organized by Karma, New York. The exhibition will feature new works by Nathaniel Axel, Darren Bader, Will Boone, Joe Bradley, Matt Connors, Roe Ethridge, Paul Lee, Nate Lowman, Sarah Lucas, Elizabeth Peyton, Torey Thornton, and Michael Williams. The exhibition borrows  its title from a line in Bukowski’s 1992 poem, Three Oranges. The multilayered exchange of textual and pictorial reference at play transforms a simple homonym into a proposition that color not only serves mimetic representation, but is also weighted with associative qualities, innuendo, cliché, and metaphor. The works in this exhibition demonstrate across a broad range of media the interdependence of color and meaning, and the many manifestations of this exchange.