Viewing Room

Art Basel 2020 | Life and Light

VIP Dates: June 17–18, 2020
Public Dates: June 19–26, 2020

#LifeandLight

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You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming. —Pablo Neruda

Lévy Gorvy is pleased to announce Life and Light, an exhibition of masterworks that will fill its online viewing room for the 2020 edition of the annual Art Basel fair. Featuring modern and contemporary works by American and European artists, Life and Light celebrates art’s ability to be a source of solace and optimism even in difficult times.

Among the works on view is Spring (1963–64), a seminal painting by Martial Raysse that features the word “Spring” spelled out in neon over a profusion of hand-painted flowers. Expressing, as the artist has written, “spring bottled-up,” the work embodies the shimmering beauty, fertility, and bounteous spirit of the season. Lévy Gorvy’s presentation also features Weisser Vogel (2000) an expansive multi-panel nail painting by Günther Uecker that conveys themes of ascent, hopefulness, and spirituality. Also on view is Venere-Persona-Alfa (2018) by Michelangelo Pistoletto, whose work will be presented in a one-artist exhibition at Lévy Gorvy’s gallery in New York this fall. This recent mirror painting revisits the great Arte Povera master’s defining Venere degli stracci (Venus of the Rags) motif, reflecting the praxis of life. Another highlight of the presentation is Peinture 81 x 57 cm, 27 septembre 2013, a numinous Outrenoir painting by Pierre Soulages, whose 100th birthday was celebrated with a critically acclaimed survey exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Concentric Squares (1977) by Frank Stella is an expansive, boldly colored canvas from his dynamic and rigorously composed series. Mother (2020) by Dan Colen is a new painting that furthers the earlier series exhibited by Lévy Gorvy in 2018. Inspired by the fantasy world of Walt Disney and the optimism of the horizon line, Colen’s work embodies a New Romanticism and positivity beyond the darkness of the forest and the present. Life and Light will debut Enrico Castellani’s Superficie sculptures in cast aluminum, a groundbreaking body of works that have never before been publicly offered.

Life and Light also includes paintings and sculpture by Terry Adkins, Lygia Clark, Robert Indiana, Donald Judd, Jutta Koether, Pablo Picasso, Carol Rama, Pat Steir, and Mickalene Thomas, among others.