Gallery Lévy Gorvy
Gerhard Richter and Roy Lichtenstein
Being a stalwart in the realm of both contemporary as well as post-war art, Lévy Gorvy is one of the galleries that has been on my radar for the longest time. I never got to visit one of their galleries while holding court in NYC, Paris, Mailand and Hong Kong and as the pandemic will not allow for a firsthand visit in the foreseeable future, it is high time for me to shed light on what has been created by Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy.
Founded in 2012, the gallery not only represent a diverse array of high calibre contemporary artists but has with its exquisitely curated exhibitions and multidisciplinary events established itself on the forefront of cutting-edge tastemakers in the art world. Needless to say, when I last visited the new Monocle HQ in Zürich, Lévy Gorvy was one of the topics that was touched on as they offer bespoke private advisory services to collectors and institutions with their local office.
For the yet to be initiated, mentioning that Lévy Gorvy’s area of expertise in the secondary market included luminaries such as Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol, should give an indication of the league they are have been playing in for close to a decade now.
With a diverse and immensely qualified team, Lévy Gorvy offers their services in areas going far beyond selling and exhibiting art, one of them being the art historical research and original scholarship, which informs the publishing of their exhibition catalogues, monographs, and other publications.
I have been an avid follower of Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre – be it sculpting, photography or painting, and have witnessed incarnations of his art and met the man in person, however, Lévy Gorvy’s publication on selected paintings from the artist’s original nineteen Colour Charts, i.e. Farbtafeln, produced in 1966, exceeded expectations. Expertly tracing Richter’s experimentation with a variety of non-compositional styles ranging from pop art via the emulation of colours based on the Ducolux sample card, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue is an example par excellence for how he toys with and questions conventions of abstraction and socio-economic implications.
I doubt that anyone remotely into art has not been exposed to the cost-effective dot printing technique that publisher Benjamin Day has pioneered, which has served as an immense source of inspiration and stimulus for the triumvirate of artists that are Sigmar Polke, Roy Lichtenstein and Gerald Laing. Given these circumstances, it should not come as a surprise that the name Source and Stimulus was chosen for an exhibition of the trio devoted to the “Ben-Day dot”.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition, the catalogue showcases the common denominator of the three artists, i.e. living and the moment and themes that were prevalent in the 1960s. The opulently illustrated catalogue not only focuses on the exhibition but is framed by expert essays and substantiated with detailed chronologies of each artist’s career.
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images from gallery website
