NEW YORK–At ARCOmadrid 2024, Lévy Gorvy Dayan (booth 7B03) presents sculptures by Gego (1912–1994) in conversation with watercolors and paintings by Francesco Clemente (b. 1952). This is the first year the gallery participates in ARCOmadrid.
Known for her complex installations and sculptures created from metal wires, Gego was a leading figure of Venezuelan abstraction in the 1960s and ’70s. Of fundamental importance to Gego was the line, drawn on paper or suspended in the air. While based on principles of geometry, her work transcended predetermined frameworks in favor of intuitive growth. Clemente began his career as part of the Italian Transavanguardia group in the late ’70s, before moving to New York and becoming part of the city’s radical art scene, collaborating with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Allen Ginsberg, among many others. Central to his practice is his nomadic lifestyle and an interest in religion, mythology, and folklore.
In Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s booth, Gego’s abstract sculptures are surrounded by self-portraits and pastels by Clemente, as well as paintings from his Winter Flowers series. Sin título (1970) was created at a pivotal moment in Gego’s career, following the first presentation of a Reticulárea installation at Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas in 1969. During this time, Gego pushed her explorations of transparency to new heights, eschewing the idea that sculptures needed a unifying mass or center. Sin título sprawls unexpectedly into its surrounding space—expertly balancing the rhythmic quality of its engineering with the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s hand as she manipulated and assembled her composition.
Clemente’s Winter Flowers canvases, each in a large square format, feature abundant color, texture, and form. Close-ups of petals, leaves, stamen, and seed pods cause the surface to shift between abstraction and figuration. The motif of the flower carries, for Clemente, a relationship to the fundamental cycles of life and immeasurable beauty. Echoing Gego’s compositional processes, Clemente has compared the method of creating the Winter Flowers to that of weaving. Rather than developing in a linear fashion, the paintings grow radially, in surprising directions from various centers of interest. Also on the booth, self-portraits by Clemente exemplify his characteristic technique of letting watercolor stain and bleed to create veils and blurs that become part of his images. For Clemente, the selfportrait constitutes a significant way of questioning and undoing identity. Like the pastels on display, these works carry a sense of the fantastical and surreal, referencing spiritual notions and ancient mythologies.
Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s presentation at ARCOmadrid follows major exhibitions of Gego’s work at the gallery’s New York and Paris locations, as well as Gego: Measuring Infinity, the celebrated retrospective recently on display at Guggenheim Bilbao (traveling from Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York). Concurrent with the fair, the exhibition Francesco Clemente: Self Portraits as the Twelve Apostles can be seen at the Hall Art Foundation, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg (until April 14, 2024), featuring works by Clemente that explore themes of identity and the self through the lens of figures in the New Testament.
