Levey Gorvy Gallery: Opening Nov. 6/ 6-9 PM, through February 15,2020

LÉVY GORVY TO PRESENT NEW PAINTINGS AND WATERCOLORS BY GÜNTHER UECKER Günther Uecker: Notations November 7, 2019—February 15, 2020 Lévy Gorvy 909 Madison Avenue New York Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 6 | 6-8PM New York - Beginning November 7, 2019, Lévy Gorvy will present Günther Uecker: Notations, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York. Notations brings together new large-scale nail paintings with a selection of watercolors from series made by Uecker (b. 1930, Wendorf, Germany) during his global travels over the past three decades. The exhibition is the first to juxtapose these disparate bodies of work, which together provide deeper insight into Uecker’s practice and the sociopolitical concerns that have informed his artistic efforts over the past 60 years. Notations will be on view through February 15, 2020. To create his signature nail paintings, Uecker stretches canvas over thick panels of wood; works a mixture of white paint and carpenter’s glue into a dense, visceral surface; then hammers nails into the panels, varying their placement, angle, and groupings intuitively to form undulating painted reliefs that cast shadows in constant motion. Unified by pictorial composition and material presence, the nails project out into the viewer’s space, suggesting forces of growth and movement, unity and disruption, order and entropy. A highlight of this new series is Weisser Schrei (White Scream), a painting Uecker describes as a self-portrait. Uecker’s watercolors reveal a wholly different but essential part of the artist’s practice. Autonomous from but parallel to his studio work, the watercolors are made spontaneously “on the road” by an inveterate traveler responding to his experiences in far-flung locales. In the tradition of the Romantics, Uecker records the intense sensations evoked by landscapes, plant life, architecture, and qualities of light and atmosphere. Abstracting these encounters into idiosyncratic forms and intense colors, Uecker’s watercolors capture the artist’s sense of wonder at the natural world. Through these watercolors, Notations will explore the impact that Uecker’s travels across Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Japan, the United States, Vietnam, and other places have had upon him as an artist. Personal in nature and intimate in scale, Uecker’s watercolors are at the same time intensely public by virtue of his active engagement with outside world. By contrast, the nail paintings are profoundly private, made in the solitude of his studio in a performative, nearly ritualistic process. The repetitive, sonorous, and tactile operations that Uecker uses to create his nail paintings comprise a meditative practice. The two contrasting bodies of work are nevertheless united by their reliance upon fluidity: both nail paintings and watercolors express motion, physical change, and spiritual transformation. By bringing these two bodies of work together, Notations aims to invite new insights into the imperatives of Uecker’s groundbreaking art. In conjunction with Notations, Lévy Gorvy will publish the first English language book dedicated to Uecker’s watercolors. This catalogue will feature writings by the artist, as well as a conversation between Uecker and Hans Ulrich Obrist. About the Artist Günther Uecker has exhibited extensively around the world since the 1960s, with solo exhibitions held at Kunsthalle Bern (1966); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (1968); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1971); Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf (1975); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (1976); Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1982); Instituto Aleman de Madrid (1988); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (1992); Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (1996); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2005); Ulmer Museum, Ulm (2010); Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts (2012); and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana (2014); and the Imam Ali Religious Arts Museum, Tehran (2016). The Central House of Artists, Moscow, staged a retrospective of Uecker’s work in 1988. This exhibition was followed in 1993 by a retrospective at Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, and a large-scale presentation of his oeuvre was organized by Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, in 2015. Uecker has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including induction into the German Pour le Mérite order for Sciences and Arts in 2000; the Berliner Bär, B.Z. Kulturpreis, Berlin, in 2005; the Jan-Willem-Ring from Dusseldorf in 2010; and the Staatspreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2015. Public institutions that house Uecker’s work include the Art Institute of Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London. Günther Uecker lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. About Lévy Gorvy Lévy Gorvy cultivates a program devoted to innovation and connoisseurship in the fields of modern, postwar, and contemporary art. Founded by Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy, Lévy Gorvy maintains gallery spaces at 909 Madison Avenue in New York, in Mayfair, London, and in Central, Hong Kong. The gallery fosters continued dedication to the living artists and artists’ estates that it represents and offers a robust program of exhibitions and multidisciplinary events. The gallery also produces ongoing art historical research and original scholarship, publishing exhibition catalogues, monographs, and other key publications. The Zürich office, Lévy Gorvy with Rumbler, offers bespoke private advisory services to collectors and institutions around the globe. 909 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021, +1 212 772 200422 Old Bond Street, London W1S 4PY, +44 (0) 203 696 5910 Ground Floor, 2 Ice House Street, Central, Hong Kong, +852 2613 9568 www.levygorvy.com | @levygorvy #levygorvy#fineartmagazine

Catch the Warhol Woman exhibition at the Levy Gorvy Gallery, BYC April 25-June15

PRESS RELEASE  WARHOL WOMEN April 25 - June 15, 2019 Lévy Gorvy 909 Madison Avenue, New York City Opening Reception: Wednesday April 24, 6-8PM New York—Beginning April 25, 2019, Lévy Gorvy will present Warhol Women, an exhibition devoted exclusively to Andy Warhol’s portraits of women from the early 1960s through the 1980s. On view through June 15 at Lévy Gorvy’s landmark building on Madison Avenue, the selection of paintings, covering the full scope of Warhol’s career, invites the viewer to ponder the artist’s complex and often contradictory relationship to myths and ideals of femininity, beauty, and power. Whether intimate or monumental in scale, each canvas embodies the ambiguities that animate Warhol’s oeuvre. Made using his signature silkscreen process, they seem at first glance to submit to impersonal iteration—the machine-like detachment of the Factory production line. Yet, upon sustained viewing, they convey something indelible about their sitters: an aura of intimacy that by turns intrigues and unsettles. Forever undecidable, these portraits offer up both the glittering surface and the raw humanity of Warhol’s art, which pulses with the evidence of his halftone silkscreen process and, in works of his later years, fluid strokes of synthetic paint. Through paintings riotous and defiant, vulnerable and demure, Warhol Women sheds fresh light on both the artist’s oeuvre and our present moment, wherein questions of female empowerment and the construction of identity through images are as urgent as ever. The exhibition opens with a sweeping wall of portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from the early 1960s. Capturing Jackie immediately before and after her husband’s assassination, this grouping weaves a cinematic narrative of supreme glamour and sudden tragedy, drawing the viewer into the public spectacle of her private grief. These monochromatic images of Jackie in mourning are shown in contrast to Red Jackie (1964), in which Warhol immortalizes the First Lady in a classic portrait of sumptuous reds. Nearby, another one of Warhol’s objects of devotion from the 1960s, Marilyn Monroe, appears atop luscious stretches of mint, licorice, and azure. Frontal and closely cropped,Licorice Marilyn (1962) and Mint Marilyn (Turquoise Marilyn), (1962), elicit adoration and desire, resembling religious icons for an image-saturated age. Also on view, Triple Mona Lisa (1963) harkens back to the history of portraiture, reproducing again one of the modern era’s most reproduced paintings through successive yet subtly different impressions of ink. Magnetic and inscrutable, Mona Lisa testifies to the captivating inaccessibility of female beauty, which often defies the viewer’s attempt to possess it. The second floor turns to Warhol’s earliest portraits. In a key 1963 canvas, prominent art collector and socialite Ethel Scull strikes a series of poses, from quizzical to buoyant, that convey an infectious vitality. The strips of images from a photo booth—the ultimate automation tool for portraiture in its day—speak to the allure of self-made celebrity to which both Scull and Warhol aspired. Other paintings feature figures who discovered power in the margins, as in the case of the striking mid-1970s example from Warhol’sLadies and Gentleman series, which depicted black and Hispanic drag queens scouted in the streets and bars of New York. Towering over the viewer, Wilhelmina Ross finds an exuberant freedom in the fluidity of gender identity. Here, as in many other works on view, Warhol’s high-key colors at once accent and conceal, promising closeness while holding the sitter forever at a distance. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Warhol increasingly staked his reputation upon celebrity portraiture, generating scores of paintings of women from popular movies, music, fashion, politics, and high society in a standardized 40-inch-square format. The final floor ofWarhol Women spotlights these works, which the artist based upon images taken with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, in an edge-to-edge, wraparound display. In feverish hues, Warhol drew out the qualities that entertainers like Dolly Parton and Liza Minnelli made famous in their splashy acts on stage and on screen. But he was equally fascinated by pioneering women who wielded power in the international arena (paintings of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and the writer and arts patron Gertrude Stein are among the examples on view), as well as those outside of the limelight. A 1974 portrait of his then-deceased mother, Julia Warhola, offers a fleeting glimpse into Warhol’s personal life, reflecting on the tenuous distinction between private self and public persona that his paintings of women similarly explore. Warhol Women includes loans from important institutions, including the Brant Foundation, New York and Connecticut, and the Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart, Germany. Alongside Warhol’s paintings, a selection of his Screen Tests—short, silent, black-and-white films that translate portraiture from canvas to celluloid—will illuminate yet another aspect of how Warhol looked at, considered, and depicted women. Projected in a room coated in aluminum foil, the installation will pay homage to the enveloping silver environment of the original Factory where these films were shot. Normally reserved for movie actors, the Hollywood screen test was co-opted by Warhol as a vehicle for making every subject a star, revealing their true identity by letting his camera roll without filtering or directing his subject. Warhol Women will be on view at the gallery from April 25 through June 15, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10Am until 6PM. Marta de Movellan, Lévy Gorvy, marta@levygorvy.com, +1 212 772.2004 www.levygorvy.com #fineartmagazine.com