Art Basel, Hong Kong

Lévy Gorvy’s presentation foregrounds cross-cultural exchange in the twentieth century, placing a diverse group of artists in dialogue in their sensibility and approach to the language of abstraction. A highlight of the booth, Pierre Soulages’ Peinture 97 x 130 cm, 30 août 1961, epitomizes this global discourse between East and West. As a young artist in the 1950s, Soulages was close with Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki, who had just moved from China to Paris. Together, they traveled to the United States and Asia, where Soulages was struck by the grace of traditional calligraphy. From his early paintings composed of black bars on a light ground, Soulages has continued to explore the effect of thick, gestural black paint on its surrounding light. Peinture 97 x 130 cm, 30 août 1961 is dominated by forceful, broad strokes of black paint that allow the luminosity of the underpainting to shine through. The painting has been in private hands since its creation in 1961, and Art Basel Hong Kong 2017 marks its first-ever public exhibition.
Zao similarly used luminous coloration and stark contrasts in his 11.11.96, 1996, on view in Lévy Gorvy’s booth, which translates the powerful gesturality of Soulages’ work into delicate, calligraphic brushwork atop a sublime field of color and pale light. 11.11.96 presents a transcendental consideration of landscape, writing, and man’s relationship to nature. Zao's abstract landscapes were recently on view at Lévy Gorvy New York, paired with paintings by Willem de Kooning in the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Willem de Kooning | Zao Wou-Ki.

Another highlight of the booth is Roy Lichtenstein’s Cosmology, 1978. Collapsing various surrealist tropes into a single image, Cosmology is steeped in self-referential markers that trace the progression of Lichtenstein’s work. Featuring motifs that hark back to the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, and René Magritte, as well as references to earlier periods of Lichtenstein’s own career, Cosmology lives up to its title, as the intensely stratified collage of historically loaded and intimately linked forms intermingle in a single image—one that manifests the inception of multiple histories of modern art.