Dreaming of Gigi

Artist Josh Gosfield invents the glamorous ‘60s French pop star Gigi Gaston and creates the definitive celebration of her life and career. VIEW OUR GALLERY.

Gigi Gaston’s 1960s-era megastardom didn’t come easy. There was the nomadic upbringing, abandonment, a brief stint as a child laborer at the hands of ferocious French nuns, lost lovers, accusations of murder, and, once she made it big, the requisite tabloid frenzy. If pop culture has taught us anything, though, it’s that stars like Gigi don’t make it much past 30. And true to form, in 1973, at the age of 31, Gigi vanished. Never to be seen or heard from again.

If only any of it were real.

Click Image to View Our Gallery of Gigi Gaston

That’s the punch line of Josh Gosfield’s solo show, “Gigi Gaston: The Black Flower” at the Steven Kasher gallery in New York (on view through November 25). With the love, care, and attention to detail of a fiercely loyal fanboy, Gosfield has composed a dazzling shrine to a pop star that never was. It’s an exercise that is as technically challenging as it is conceptually rigorous. And Gosfield, a former art director of New York magazine, revels in every minute aspect of Gigi’s pop-culture universe.

The sweet hum of one of Gigi’s pop ballads wafts through the gallery, playing from a small “period” television that’s screening a “Jean-Luc Godard-directed” music video on a loop (fortunately for Gosfield the art world allows for such identity theft—indulges it, even…). The song, “Je Suis Perdue,” brings to mind the raspy acoustics of French first lady Carla Bruni, a figure to whom Gigi’s resemblance is, I suspect, no accident.

The Photoshopped posters, album covers, photographs, and ephemera that follow are delightfully authentic. Gosfield mastered bubbly 1960s typography; he set images of his fictional starlet on sepia-toned newsprint with frayed, crumpled corners; he wrote and designed news stories in true-to-life publications like Paris Match, Pop Weekly, and ABC; and he shot a series of album covers bearing the logo of now-defunct jazz label Disques Vogue. It’s not hard to buy into it—the catalogue (a signed, limited edition artwork in its own right) even comes the sort of plastic slipcover you’d expect to find while perusing vintage magazines at a flea market.

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