The question, "Is there life on Mars?" is a rhetorical one, posed in the face of a world in which increasingly accelerating global events—political, social, natural, and economic—seem to challenge and threaten to overtake our most basic forms of everyday existence.

Rather than a literal search for extraterrestrial intelligence, this question might be seen as a metaphorical quest to explore what it means to be human in this radically unmoored world. Moving from the micro to the macro levels of experience, the exhibition proposes to look at the multiple perspectives and myriad responses to this 21st-century dilemma from artists from all over the globe.

Today, a concern with the question of what it means to be human can be found in contemporary art everywhere. Many of the younger artists in the exhibition have inherited a legacy that seeks to produce the momentary, the ephemeral, and the modest rather than the monumental. One sees in their work not a discredited universal humanism but a real connection to the human condition, expressed with an economy of means that is at once fragile and powerful.

Life on Mars is a collective self-portrait of humanity colliding with the economic and political events that define daily existence. Questions of our survival are humorously and poignantly brought to the fore in films, installations, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that search for the sublime in the banality of everyday life.

The exhibition will be on view through January 11, 2009.

Richard Wright, Born: 1960, London, England, Lives and Works: Glasgow, Scotland

With an acute understanding of form, architecture, and color, Richard Wright paints ephemeral wall drawings that call attention to overlooked parts of our built environment while subtly altering the viewer's experience of space. Wright's primary manner of working consists of installations or interventions, often placed in unconventional or marginalized spaces of a site—ceilings, cornices, windowpanes, or the edges of a wall. Using simply a brush and paint, the artist creates his wall drawings on site in a time-consuming and laborious process. The results are improvisational yet precise paintings with designs ranging from organic, tattoo-like forms to geometric line drawings to cosmological sunbursts or constellations. Wright's work is temporary by nature, as the artist insists that each of his wall drawings must be painted over at the end of an exhibition. He thus asserts the importance of erasure as a natural part of creativity and the possibility for quiet marks on a wall to change our perception of everything around them. -- www.gagosian.com