DOMINIQUE LEVY's Post-War and Contemporary GRISAILLE Masterworks Presented at Art Basel 2015

In 1625, Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens wrote that he was creating an oil sketch of the Three Graces using opalescent gray and warm brown hues- "en grisaille et non couleurs"- thus giving name to the practice of intentional chromatic reduction in painting and sculpture that has become an enduring paradigm of artistic practice to the present day.

At Art Basel 2015, Dominique Le?vy (Booth G14) will present an exhibition of masterworks in varying tones of gray, focusing on achromaticity throughout postwar and contemporary art. This presentation highlights such renowned artists as Alberto Giacometti, David Hammons, Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Pierre Soulages, and Christopher Wool, among many others, for whom gray has figured as a central element in artmaking.

When pressed on his use of grays, browns, and whites, Albert Giacomettifamously asked, "If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience... why should I use any other color?" Dominique Le?vy's booth features Tête de Diego au col roulé, a painted bronze bust of the artist's brother Diego, a departure from Giacometti's previous elongated forms and a signal of the new framework he developed in the early 1950s for creating sculpture from life.

Zehn Farben (Ten Colors) is the first of Gerhard Richter's Color Chart paintings, of which he made 123 between 1966 and 2008. Richter freely composed the Color Charts, experimenting with a variety of formats for both the color units and the overall paintings. He believed the charts provided a way to divorce color from its traditional descriptive, symbolic, and expressive ends, enacting a systematic, even scientific exploration of color. Although Richter's Color Charts employ wide spectra of color, the hues of this first painting are muted and restrained, including primarily the grays and browns typical togrisaille painting.

Also on view is a collaged mixed-media work on paper made by Frank Stella nine years after the completion of his celebrated Black Paintings, as well as an early white painting by Robert Ryman. Though chromatically distant, these two works both employ monochrome to explore new possibilities for the medium of painting.

For Christopher Wool, gray is emphatically neither black nor white, but exists as a new zone of emotive indeterminacy. In his gray paintings, begun in 2000, each layer of spray-painted lines is obfuscated and blurred to the point at which it becomes impossible to distinguish amongst various imbrications. Wool's Untitled (P 583) (2009), presented at the booth, is a large silkscreen comprised of images of these gray paintings.

Dominique Le?vy is also presenting Le pientre au chapeau (1965) by Pablo Picasso. The artist purged color from his most evocative artworks in order to highlight their formal structure and autonomy, claiming that color "weakened" the painting. Here, Picasso uses grayscale to pay homage to another virtuoso of painting, Henri Matisse.

Günther Uecker: Sandmühle at Unlimited

Dominique Le?vy is pleased to present Sandmühle (Sand Mill) by the influential German artist Günther Uecker at this year's Unlimited. This work is part of Uecker's series of Sandmühlen (Sand Mills), also called Zeitspiralen (Time Spirals), which he has been creating since 1969. The ritualistic, circular motion of the mill imitates the ceremonial processes of both work -exemplified by the repetitive labor of the plow that sows and tills the earth, whether pushed by a man or a motor- and play, suggesting the circle-configurations of children's games or a carousel. In its paradoxical simultaneity of motion and stillness, the sand mill also echoes the Zen garden, an architectural structure close to Uecker's heart. However, the sculpture's most profound function is to act as a three-dimensional demonstration of the cosmic passage of time, of constant transformation in uniformity, of the mutual dependence and dissonant harmony between creation and destruction.

One of the early examples of Uecker's sand mills was included in the landmark exhibition Earth Art, held at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University in New York in 1969 and shown alongside other important examples of land art by artists such as Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Long, and Robert Smithson.

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