Domenico Gnoli @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, NYC - "The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli" Survey Exhibition

The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

March 18 – May 23, 2026

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli, the largest exhibition of works by the artist in the United States in more than five decades, following his celebrated 1969 solo presentation at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. Featuring paintings, drawings, etchings, notebooks, and letters, the survey represents a critical continuation of Gnoli’s legacy in America, subsequent to his major 2021–22 retrospective at the Fondazione Prada, Milan. This exhibition is organized in collaboration with Gnoli’s widow, Yannick Vu, and the artist’s estate—as well as to present works from the artist’s sister, Mimì Gnoli, and major private collections.  

 

In his brief yet prolific life, Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970) established himself as a master of perception, creating a body of paintings unparalleled in their composition and meticulous detail. Born in Rome, he began his career as an illustrator and set and costume designer, working and traveling across the world while arriving to his mature style as a painter in 1964. His late paintings picture everyday objects— including clothing, hair, beds, and sofas—enlarged, fragmented, and suspended. The canvases are at once absorbing and uncanny, revealing secrets of contemporary life yet unconsidered.

Through the isolation of his subjects, Domenico Gnoli elevates and explores reality through detail, yielding figurative works that stand, in the words of Germano Celant, “at the limits of sensory perception.” Domenico Gnoli himself wrote of his method, “Would you call it surrealistic? Or abstract? I don’t know… All I know is that it’s a completely new theory about art, a new approach that makes the pictures appear just like life does…” While focused on what can be seen—as Domenico Gnoli described, “common objects, isolated from their usual context”—his paintings possess an aura that reaches beyond reality—exuding “a sense of order that approaches serenity, an almost monastic orderliness,” explains his partner and widow Yannick Vu. Domenico Gnoli in part achieves this atmosphere through the framing, magnification, and stillness of his subject matter, evoking the photographic. At the same time, he imbues his works with a distinguished materiality by incorporating sand into his pigments, creating encrusted surfaces that recall the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance.

Of his practice, Domenico Gnoli stated “I am metaphysical inasmuch as I search for a still and atmospheric, noneloquent painting, one that takes static situations as its starting point. I am not metaphysical insofar as I have never sought to elaborate or fabricate an image. I always employ simple, given elements, I Don't want either to add or take anything away. I have never even wanted to deform; I isolate and represent. My themes come from the world around me, familiar situations, everyday life; because I never actively mediate against the object, I experience the magic of its presence.” Of his legacy, Yannick Vu writes, “With the appearances of reality.”

ARTIST DOMENICO GNOLI

Born in Rome to a ceramicist and an art historian, Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970) spent his early years between the capital and Spoleto. At 16, he began studying drawing and etching under painter and printmaker Carlo Alberto Petrucci, and two years later he was exhibiting his work alongside such established artists as Giacomo Manzù and Giorgio Morandi. At 19, he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome, but soon left to travel in Paris and London. In his twenties, he spent time in New York; he authored a children’s book that was published by Simon & Schuster, designed scenography for the Old Vic Theatre in London and the Schauspielhaus in Zürich, and worked as an illustrator for such publications as Sports Illustrated, Life, and Horizons. He married sculptor Yannick Vu in 1965, and they lived between Majorca and Rome. In 1968, Gnoli’s work was included in Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany, as well as featured in solo exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany. Two years later he died of cancer at the age of 36, just four months after his enthusiastically received first exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. He developed his signature style of painting in the decade before his 1969 New York presentation and created a limited number of works during this mature period. Posthumously, he garnered widespread acclaim. In 2021, Fondazione Prada in Milan organized a major retrospective dedicated to Gnoli’s work. 

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN

19 East 64th Street, New York

www.levygorvydayan.com

Mark Bradford @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, NYC - 'Thievery by Servants' Exhibition

Mark Bradford

Thievery by Servants

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

February 19 - April 4, 2026

Born in 1961 in Los Angeles, Mark Bradford has emerged as one of the most distinctive and powerful voices in contemporary American art. His childhood in South Central—an area shaped by racial tensions, economic inequalities, and the shifting cultural dynamics of the city—forms the foundation of an artistic sensibility deeply attuned to social structures. Before entering the California Institute of the Arts, Mark Bradford worked in his mother’s hair salon, a space that was at once intimate and communal, where stories, gestures, and materials circulated freely. This experience, far from anecdotal, shaped his understanding of the world: it offered him an embodied knowledge of urban micro‑territories, marginalized forms of sociability, and the material textures of everyday life.

At CalArts, where he earned his MFA in 1997, Mark Bradford developed a practice that reconfigures the codes of abstraction by anchoring them in a critical reading of social space. His work is constructed from modest materials—torn posters, end papers from hairdressing, cardboard, string, and urban debris—which he accumulates, glues, tears, sands, or scrapes. These gestures, rooted as much in manual labor as in urban practices of collage and erasure, produce stratified surfaces that evoke fragmented cartographies, urban palimpsests, or archives under tension. For Mark Bradford, abstraction is never a retreat from reality; it becomes a tool of inquiry, a way of making visible the social forces that shape territories and bodies.

The themes that run through his work—race, African American identity, urban segregation, structural violence, collective memory—are part of a broader reflection on power and dominant narratives. Bradford interrogates how cities are built and undone, how communities are displaced, how histories are erased or rewritten. His often monumental works function as critical cartographies: they reveal the fault lines, zones of tension, and invisible circulations that compose the social geography of the United States.

Several emblematic projects testify to this ambition. Scorched Earth (2015), presented at the Hammer Museum, revisits the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, a long‑suppressed episode of American racial history. Through its scale and materiality, the installation brings to the surface the violence embedded in the strata of time and urban space. In 2017, Mark Bradford represented the United States at the Venice Biennale with Tomorrow Is Another Day, transforming the American Pavilion into a space of ruins, debris, and reconstruction—a metaphor for a nation marked by its contradictions and wounds. That same year, Pickett’s Charge, a circular installation at the Hirshhorn Museum, reinterpreted an engraving of the Battle of Gettysburg to question national mythologies and the heroic narratives that shape collective memory.

Bradford’s engagement extends beyond the museum sphere. Through Art + Practice, the organization he co‑founded in Los Angeles, he develops support programs for young people in precarious situations, particularly those in the foster care system. This social dimension is not peripheral but rather an extension of his artistic practice: it affirms the continuity between artistic creation, civic responsibility, and the transformation of living conditions.

Today, Mark Bradford is recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His work, exhibited in major international institutions, articulates with rare coherence the formal power of abstraction and the depth of political reflection. By bringing together modest materials and structural issues, manual gestures and social cartographies, Mark Bradford offers a sensitive and critical reading of the contemporary world, where art becomes a space of memory, resistance, and reinvention.

LEVY GORVY DAYAN

19 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.levygorvydayan.com

Lévy Gorvy Dayan at Art Basel 2025

Lévy Gorvy Dayan at Art Basel 2025

Messe Basel, Booth E12

June 17 – 22, 2025

YOKO ONO

Pointedness (detail), 1964/66 

Acrylic sphere on engraved acrylic pedestal, 

sphere diameter: 2⅝ inches (6.6 cm), 

pedestal: 56⁵⁄₁₆ × 10½ × 10 inches 

(143 × 26.6 × 25.4 cm) 

Edition 1 of 3, with 2 AP

Image courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

YOKO ONO

Water Piece (Painting to Be Watered) (detail), 1962/66 

Sponge, eyedropper, and water in glass vial 

on engraved acrylic pedestal, element dimensions variable, 

pedestal: 23½ × 23½ × 23½ inches (59.7 × 59.7 × 59.7 cm)

Edition 1 of 3, with 2 AP

Image courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

YOKO ONO

Forget It (detail), 1966 

Stainless steel needle on engraved acrylic pedestal, 

needle height: 3⅛ inches (8 cm), 

pedestal: 49¹³⁄₁₆ × 12 × 12 inches 

(126.5 × 30.5 × 30.5 cm)

Edition 1 of 3, with 2 AP

Image courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Lévy Gorvy Dayan (Booth E12) presents three significant early works by Yoko Ono in its salon installation of singular modern and contemporary painting and sculpture at Art Basel.

Yoko Ono’s Pointedness (1964/66), Forget It (1966), and Water Piece (Painting to Be Watered) (1962/66) each debuted in her critically important solo presentation Yoko at Indica: Unfinished Paintings and Objects, Indica Gallery, London, 1966—the exhibition that also occasioned the artist first meeting John Lennon. Vehicles for ideas, Yoko Ono referred to these sculptures as “conceptual objects.” Incorporating readymades and encouraging physical and mental participation by the viewer, the works demonstrated an evolution of her Instruction Paintings of 1960 and 1961 and later Instructions for Paintings, which began in 1962 and represented the instruction itself as the artwork—divorcing concept from canvas, a development that anticipated conceptual art. Ono further advanced her project in 1964 when she published the influential book of her instructions Grapefruit.

Ono composed her “conceptual objects” utilizing translucent acrylic Plexiglas for pedestals that were engraved with her instruction texts—and presented modified readymade objects that recalled, in part, the work of Duchamp. Featured in the consequential white and transparent installation at Indica Gallery, the present sculptures invite consideration of the nature of absence and presence, visibility and invisibility, language and action. Tracing the evolution of Ono’s practice and object-making, Water Piece (Painting to Be Watered), for example, relates to her earlier Waterdrop Painting (1961) that asked the audience to drip water onto a piece of canvas on the floor. It also connects to her instruction published in Grapefruit: “Painting to be watered / Water every day. / 1962 summer.” The instruction “water every day” is here inscribed on the acrylic pedestal and the viewer is invited to wet the sponge with the eyedropper—an action that is infinitely repeatable as the water will evaporate. The participatory and imaginative sculptures illustrate how Ono’s practices in music, poetry, painting, and performance informed these culminating works.

PIERRE SOULAGES

Peinture 162 × 130 cm, 6 octobre 1963

Oil on canvas, 

Work: 63¾ × 51³⁄₁₆ inches (162 × 130 cm)

Framed: 69¾ × 56¹⁵⁄₁₆ inches (177.1 × 144.7 cm)

Image courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

GUNTHER UECKER

Doppel Spirale, 2019

Paint and nails on canvas on board

78¹³⁄₁₆ × 63¹⁄₁₆ inches (200.2 × 160.2 cm)

Image courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

THOMAS HOUSCAGO

Crystal No. 1, 2025

Bronze 

37¹³⁄₁₆ × 18⅛ × 25³⁄₁₆ inches (96 × 46 × 64 cm) 

Edition of 3, with 2 AP

Image courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

The booth will also feature a notable canvas in black, blue, and white oil by Pierre Soulages—Peinture 162 x 130 cm, 6 octobre 1963—that was first exhibited at the eminent Kootz Gallery, New York, in the artist’s 1964 solo presentation. Günther Uecker’s large-scale nail painting Doppel Spirale (2019) portrays two circular clusters of nails rhythmically undulating across the surface of the composition. A new sculptural work by Thomas Houseago, Crystal No. 1 (2025) will present an abstract female form in bronze from the artist’s series of metal plate constructions, which he initiated in 2018. The booth will additionally showcase a selection of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s recent Color and Light (2024) works in a vibrant array of hues, which reflect his lifelong use and exploration of the mirror in his oeuvre.

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN

www.levygorvydayan.com

Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York - "The Human Situation" Exhibition

The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh 

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

April 10 – June 21, 2025

Sylvia Sleigh 

The Blue Dress, 1970

Oil on canvas, 66½ × 34½ inches (168.9 × 87.6 cm) 

Collection of Audrey and Joseph Anastasi 

© Estate of Sylvia Sleigh, 

courtesy of the Estate of Sylvia Sleigh and Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Alice Neel 

Pregnant Nude, 1967

Oil on canvas, 36½ × 57¼ inches (92.7 × 145.4 cm)

Private Collection, New York, courtesy of AWG Art Advisory

© Estate of Alice Neel, 

courtesy of the Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh. The exhibition, conceived by Saara Pritchard, marks the first focused presentation of Marcia Marcus (b. 1928), Alice Neel (1900–1984), and Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010), who each worked in New York City and shared in its artistic circles in the dynamic decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. During this period, they portrayed mutual sitters, exhibited together, and participated in public discussions. Their representations of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are distinctive in form and style, yet share in their evocation of the human spirit, capturing Sylvia Sleigh’s reflection “The human situation adds a certain poignancy to portraits...”

In 1973, paintings by the three figurative artists were on view in the unprecedented exhibition Women Choose Women, organized by Women in the Arts and presented at the New York Cultural Center. The three painters would exhibit together again in the following years, notably in Women’s Work: American Art 1974, Philadelphia Civic Center and In Her Own Image, Samuel S. Fleischer Art Memorial, administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (both part of Focus on Women in the Visual Arts, 1974)—as well as Sons and Others: Women Artists See Men, Queens Museum (1975). Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh too were early participants in the collaborative installation The Sister Chapel, PS1, New York (1978)—from which Marcia Marcus eventually withdrew due to teaching and other exhibition commitments—with Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh unveiling large-scale paintings.

In their works, each artist differentiated herself from prevailing modes of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism—capturing Neel’s predecessor Robert Henri’s principle “Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.” Their distinguished images depicted many of the same artistic and critical figures, including David Bourdon, Sari Dienes, Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, and John Perreault, among others, as well as self-portraits. They also each painted or collaborated with writers and curators such as Lucy Lippard, Cindy Nemser, Linda Nochlin, Barbara Rose, Marcia Tucker, and Sleigh’s husband Lawrence Alloway.

While working at different phases of maturity in their practices during the 1960s and 1970s, they experienced the period’s socio-political movements, including for civil and women’s rights. This historical environment is described by Lucy Lippard in her exhibition catalogue introduction for Women Choose Women: 

“A largescale exhibition of women’s art in New York is necessary at this time for a variety of reasons: because so few women have up until now been taken seriously enough to be considered for, still less included in, museum group shows; because there are so few women in the major commercial galleries; because young women artists are lucky if they can find ten successful older women artists to whom to look as role models; because although seventy-five percent of the undergraduate art students are female, only two percent of their teachers are female. And above all—because the New York museums have been particularly discriminatory, usually under the guise of being discriminating.” 

Although the three artists aligned with and participated in feminist causes to varying degrees, the energies of the movement created a focus on women’s art, resulting in exhibitions, galleries such as AIR Gallery and Soho 20 Gallery, grassroots publications, organizations including Women’s Interart Center and Women’s Caucus for Art, and panel discussions, in which they each featured. The portraits by Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh gesture towards this critical art-historical moment, while illuminating for viewers each artist’s distinctive point of view. 

As a testament to their legacies, the exhibition features works by contemporary figurative painters Jenna Gribbon, Karolina Jabłońska, Chantal Joffe, Nikki Maloof, Wangari Mathenge, and Claire Tabouret, who carry forward the tradition of rendering lived images of self, family, friends, and the home. Presenting recent and new canvases created on the occasion of the exhibition, the contemporary artists share in the history and atmosphere of community, and expand upon the themes of womanhood, intimate portraiture, the nude, and the still life that underlie The Human Situation. 

LEVY GORVY DAYAN, NEW YORK

19 East 64th Street, New York City

www.levygorvydayan.com

Related Posts:

Marcia Marcus, Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973 @ Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, October 12 - December 2, 2017

Alice Neel: The Early Years @ David Zwirner, New York, September 9 - October 16, 2021

Alice Neel: Freedom @ David Zwirner, New York, February 26 - April 13, 2019

Alice Neel @ Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18 - April 15, 2001

Sylvia Sleigh: Every leaf is precious @ Ortuzar, New York, February 12 – April 5, 2025

Danielle Orchard and Aristide Maillol @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

Danielle Orchard and Aristide Maillol

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

March 14 – April 26, 2025

Danielle Orchard 

Moon Garden, 2025

Oil on canvas, 80¼ × 68½ inches (203.8 × 174 cm)

Photo Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Aristide Maillol 

La Nuit, conceived 1908 / cast during the artist’s lifetime

Patinated bronze, 6¹⁵⁄₁₆ × 4¹³⁄₁₆ × 4½ inches (17.6 × 12.2 × 11.5 cm). 

Edition 3 of 4

Photo Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents an exhibition of sculptures by Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) in conversation with new paintings by Danielle Orchard (b. 1985), created on the occasion of the exhibition. Staging a dialogue between painting and sculpture that is beyond time, the exhibition represents visions of form, volume, and line, explored through the female figure.

Central to the practices of both artists is the woman as muse. Here, in scenes domestic and natural, Danielle Orchard depicts physical and psychological insights gained in her experiences as a new mother—an infant shares each composition with her female protagonists. Aristide Maillol often said, “I invent nothing, no more than the apple tree can pretend to have invented its apples.” His works and those of Danielle Orchard are both marked by the impulse towards, in the words of art historian John Rewald, “the expression of truth and the balance of forms.”

For Aristide Maillol, the pursuit of the female figure became the artist’s sole occupation upon his turn to sculpture in1898, after his work in tapestry threatened him with blindness. Embracing this change with joy and vigor, Maillol developed a harmonious oeuvre that married experimentation, classical Greek influences, and the pastoral. Danielle Orchard notes, “I am looking at how [Maillol] is pulling from antiquity, with a deference for abstraction in ways that I have thought about in painting—and inhabiting these forms as a female body.” 

Navigating solidity and delicacy, Maillol and Orchard’s compositions represent densely sculptural beings, rendered by hand in clay or by brush in oil. Yet, through symbolism, rounded curves, diffuse light, softened shadows, or washes of color, their works possess an intimacy, quietude, and stillness. In Moon Garden (2025), Danielle Orchard portrays the silhouettes of three La Nuit (Night) casts by Aristide Maillol in the background. Two dandelions appear undisturbed in the grass near a totemic mother and child, while a woman reposes in the foreground with an owl on her head, an emblem of the barred owl that resides in Orchard’s backyard in Pelham, Massachusetts. 

Among Maillol’s most significant works, La Nuit depicts a seated female figure whose arms and legs are drawn inwards in a self-contained pose that conveys mystery, serenity, and universality. Upon viewing La Nuit in Paris at the 1909 Salon d’Automne, Auguste Rodin declared, “One forgets too often that the human body is an architecture—a living architecture.” 

Bridging two and three dimensions, Aristide Maillol was a committed draftsman, who insisted, according to John Rewald, “that it was possible to make a statuette from a good drawing.” He continues, “[Maillol’s] drawings nearly always reveal the preoccupations of a modeler: their curves are projected into space, their static poses being akin to sculptured forms.” Danielle Orchard relatedly harnesses the sculptural qualities of her medium, building thin layered applications of oil paint, while negotiating color and form. Representing a timeless exchange across disciplines, the exhibited works capture, in the elder sculptor’s words, “poems of life.” 

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN, NEW YORK

19 East 64th Street, New York City

www.levygorvydayan.com

Artist N. Dash @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London

N. Dash

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London

April 25 – June 15, 2024

N. Dash 

GP_24, 2024 

Earth, acrylic, cardboard corners, graphite, 

hardware, string, and jute, 

84 × 64½ inches (213.4 × 163.8 cm)

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist N. Dash, inaugurating the gallery’s new location in London’s Mayfair district. The artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery features multi-panel paintings that explore ecologies of resonance among disparate materials. N. Dash’s practice is grounded in and distinguished by bringing together organic substances, manufactured readymade objects, and images resulting from embodied processes. The tactile surfaces of these restrained, luminous works emphasize haptic experience, drawing attention to the subtle yet seismic effects of touch.

N. Dash 

H_24, 2024 

Earth, oil, silkscreen ink, and jute 

66½ × 48 inches (168.9 × 121.9 cm)

N. Dash’s paintings draw on the building blocks of our natural and constructed worlds, including earth and water, jute and cotton, graphite and oil, along with oft-overlooked fabricated items such as architectural insulation and factory-produced cardboard. Across the works in the exhibition, these elements are recombined to elevate the structural, textural, and energetic synergies and tensions among them. A work whose hue resembles patinated copper might comprise Styrofoam insulation, or an image might be silkscreened onto a panel on which earth has been troweled and dried into a cracked, furrowed plane. There are slippages among the many materials, processes, and signifiers that are evoked in these paintings—each held together by careful, spare decisions.

At the core of N. Dash’s work is a daily ritual wherein the artist rubs a small piece of white cotton between finger and thumb until the machine-loomed fibers fray and lose their gridded structure, decomposing into an abject tangle. For the artist, the fabric serves as a recording device on which actions are imprinted, energy is captured, and immaterial forces are stored. The resulting sculptures are colored by a patina of dirt and oils, transformed by the spontaneous movement of the artist’s body. The grid, one of modernism’s paradigmatic forms, is undone again and again in the artist’s hand—by the body, the weather, and the environment. The artist photographs iterations of these sculptures and silkscreens the images onto panels prepared with earth, such that the images undulate according to the earth’s topography. In addition, planes of color are silkscreened, leaving fields of rosette patterns that result from the halftone printing process.

The works’ beveled edges reveal their earthen substrates, allowing them to breathe. In these carved-out margins, the layers of earth, gesso, and jute are rendered visible, exposing the quasi-geologic structure of each panel. This strategy appears differently in a series of works in which strings are embedded in, or excavated from, the earthen grounds, the latter creating fine trenches of negative space, where the materiality of the work is exposed and raw. Ecological concerns course through these paintings with references to human and nonhuman interconnection and intervention. They examine, on an intimate scale, the impact of touch on natural resources, and reckon with the ways in which synthetic materials contain, shape, and merge with the environment. Here, Photoshop can imitate a field of flowers with an algorithmic printing pattern, but a rosette is still a field of ones and zeros. These questions of mimesis, artificiality, and exploitation are at play in these paintings, but subtly so. Through the works on view, nature and byproducts of manufacture are counterposed on vertical stages of earth, uplifting this most fundamental material and source.

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN 

35 Dover Street, London 

www.levygorvydayan.com

Artist Yves Klein Exhibition @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York - "Yves Klein and the Tangible World"

Yves Klein and the Tangible World 

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York 

April 11 – May 25, 2024 

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Yves Klein and the Tangible World, an exhibition devoted to the engagement of the body in the visionary French artist’s oeuvre. Curated in collaboration with the Yves Klein Foundation, the presentation brings together nearly 30 examples of Yves Klein’s Anthropométries (1960–62) and Peintures de feu (Fire Paintings, 1960–62), as well as Sculpture tactile (Tactile Sculpture, conceived c. 1957) in the first focused juxtaposition of these works.

Yves Klein’s paintings affirm his conviction that art should exude life. His Anthropométries and Peintures de feu exemplify this ethos, possessing traces of living flesh and imprinted memories of fire, water, earth, and air. Klein once wrote, “The link between spirit and matter is energy. The combined mechanism of these three elements generates our tangible world, which is claimed to be real but is in fact ephemeral.” Through direct physical contact and alchemy, energy is captured and transferred in the works on view, binding the soul and the material support.

The practice of employing nude models, as in Yves Klein’s words “living brushes,” began in 1958 during a private performance in Paris, in which a model, covered in paint, created an International Klein Blue (IKB) monochrome. Subsequently, in 1960, Yves Klein began using painted models to leave discernible imprints that served as “mark[s] of the immediate.” The body trace paintings joined Klein’s artistic practice with his expertise in choreographed motion and energy release, gained from years of dedication to judo—the graceful arabesques rendered in pigment echoing the shadows of judo movements on white competition mats. Unlike action painting, Klein’s Anthropométries manifested considered compositions, the result of planned and dedicated collaboration between the artist and his models. 

For Yves Klein, not only did the nude body provide articulate mark-making, but it also represented openness, liberation, and a celebration of being. Importantly, he did not view his works as figurative in a traditional sense, derived from the hand of the artist. As he wrote on the creation of the Anthropométries, “the work of art must complete itself before my eyes and under my command…. as soon as the work is realized, I stand there—present at the ceremony, spotless, calm, relaxed, worthy of it, and ready to receive it as it is born into the tangible world.” 

Among the paintings exhibited will be the blue and gold anthropometry and cosmogony Anthropométrie sans titre (ANT 101, 1960), the first presentation of this monumental work in the United States since the 1960s. Measuring over four meters tall, the composition features two arching forms levitating above a ground with three figures, appearing amidst negative imprints of plants— bringing together man and nature. A group of Anthropométries suaire (Shroud Anthropometries) will also be on view, including Vampire (ANT SU 20, 1960). Painted in pink, blue, and black on silk or gauze, the loosely woven surfaces of the shroud works enhance the aura of the body, while referencing death and resurrection. 

Formed by fire, water, and flesh, Yves Klein’s Peintures de feu embody creation born of destruction: “Fire, for me, is the future without forgetting the past. It is the memory of nature.” The series began following the artist’s 1961 retrospective at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, that included outdoor fire sculptures, which he used to make the first group of fire paintings. Klein continued the series at the Centre d’Essais du Gaz de France, near Paris. Holding a fire torch, Yves Klein exposed flames to compressed board or paper, leaving scorched voids and atmospheres of smoke. He later introduced body imprints, made with water, into his environments of light and shadow. 

The Anthropométries and the fire paintings are distinguished by their distinctive materiality—characterized by paint, resin, physical contact, flame, and support. This tangible essence is epitomized in Sculpture tactile—which will be presented with a human model on Thursdays and Saturdays from 2–6 pm during the exhibition. “They were boxes, each pierced with two holes fitted with sleeves,” Klein wrote. “The idea was to be able to put one’s hands inside the box up to one’s elbows and to touch and examine the sculpture in the interior of the box without being able to see it.” The box was conceived to hold a living sculpture, a nude model, but was not presented as intended during Klein’s lifetime. Here, the activation of Sculpture tactile will foreground the engagement and tactility of the body as well as perceptions of touch.

The exhibition also includes a sculptural floor installation of Pigment pur bleu (Pure Blue Pigment, conceived 1957). Composed by gravity, the sculpture comprises countless powdered grains of pure International Klein Blue. In this form, Klein exalted, the textured pigment possesses “a brilliance and an extraordinary, autonomous life of [its] own”—revealing “color in itself. The living and tangible matter of color.” Klein espoused the primacy of color as a pictorial and physically sensorial phenomenon. Evoking the sea and the sky, Yves Klein believed “blue has no dimensions” and could transport viewers to a realm of boundless space and the experience of immaterial sensibility. 

Photographs, ephemera, and film will enrich the exhibition, demonstrating Klein’s process and his singular awareness of documentation, communication, and performance. Featured will be a large-scale archival projection of the artist’s March 1960 presentation at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain in Paris, in which Klein conducted three nude models in the creation of an Anthropométrie and one corporeal monochrome, while a small orchestra performed his Symphonie Monotone-Silence (Monotone-Silence Symphony, conceived 1947–49) before an audience of 100 guests—as well as Klein’s newspaper Dimanche, published November 27, 1960, that includes his prolific writings and the photograph Leap into the Void (1960). 

On the occasion of the exhibition, Lévy Gorvy Dayan will present a performance of Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony at St. James’ Church, New York, on Wednesday, May 1, at 6:30 pm. Conducted by Petr Kotik and performed by the orchestra and choir of the S.E.M. Ensemble, the symphony is composed of a single note held for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of silence. Producing the sensation of endless duration, Klein describes the symphony as “[consisting] of one unique continuous ‘sound,’ drawn out and deprived of its beginning and of it end, creating a feeling of vertigo and of aspiration outside of time…. In the world of our possibilities of conscious perception, it is silence—audible perception.”

Yves Klein and the Tangible World continues Dominique Lévy’s more than 20-year representation of the Yves Klein Estate and now the Yves Klein Foundation, and her commitment to the enduring, contemporary relevance and legacy of the artist’s work. The exhibition follows earlier presentations including Yves Klein: A Career Survey (2005, L&M Arts, New York) and Audible Presence: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Cy Twombly (2013, Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York). In 2013, Dominique Lévy Gallery presented the first public performance in New York City of Monotone-Silence Symphony at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, followed by a 2017 performance of the Symphony at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

YVES KLEIN

A leading figure of the postwar avant-garde, Yves Klein (1928–1962) sought radical ways to represent the immaterial and the infinite. In paintings, sculptures, actions, and events, he conveyed a rigorous, provocative exploration of nature and its forces. In the late 1950s he associated with Düsseldorf’s Group Zero, and in 1960 he became a founding member of the Nouveaux Réalistes.

Yves Klein was born to artist parents in Nice, France. As early as 1947, he declared the blue of the sky to be his first artwork. He made great use of the color throughout his career, considering it “the invisible becoming visible.” In his 20s, Klein studied Rosicrucianism and traveled to Japan to practice judo. Settling in Paris in 1955, he first exhibited monochrome paintings at the Club des Solitaires. In 1958, he emptied the Galerie Iris Clert and presented the space itself as a work, Le Vide (The Void). Beginning in 1959, he sold Immaterial Zones of Pictorial Sensibility in exchange for a specified amount of gold, half of which he threw into the Seine. The following year, he patented International Klein Blue (IKB)—an ultramarine paint he developed with a chemical retailer. He also embarked upon his Anthropométries series, wherein he choreographed “living brushes”—nude models with blue paint applied to their bodies who pressed themselves on canvas and paper. Soon after, Yves Klein created his photomontage Leap into the Void (1960) in which the artist appears to fly from a second story window in Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris. In 1961, he was given his first retrospective, at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, West Germany, as well as solo exhibitions at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles. 

In the eight years before his death from a heart attack in 1962, Yves Klein produced over a thousand works and many prescient writings. Among the numerous retrospectives dedicated to his work are those organized by Tate Gallery, London (1974); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1982); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1994); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2004); Guggenheim Bilbao (2005); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006–2007) [in French]; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2010); Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires (2017).

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN 

19 East 64th Street, New York

www.levygorvydayan.com