New York|Miami... From December 3 through 6, 2015, Dominique Lévy will present You Must Go On. I Can't Go On. I'll Go On. in the gallery's booth (K11) at Art Basel Miami Beach. Featuring works by David Hammons, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Senga Nengudi, Thomas Schütte, Frank Stella, Rudolf Stingel, Günther Uecker, and Christopher Wool, this exhibition explores how, with Minimalist painting in the 1960s, the medium reached an endgame, a breaking point. After critics and curators alike decried painting as dead, however, artists continued to create, to go on, pushing past the previously conceived limits of the medium.
The exhibition takes its title from the closing lines of Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable. Here, the anonymous narrator's interior monologue reaches an impasse: how, he asks himself, can he find a way to proceed at the cusp between narratives? His central concern is that he may be constructed by the very language that he speaks, his identity folding back on itself, made by the means of his own thinking. Thus, he realizes, he cannot exist outside the formal parameters of the medium by which he is formed. These lines reveal the dilemma inherent in such a construction: how might one continue to create, to exist, after the medium's breaking point has been reached? Written in 1953, Beckett's novel stands as a literary corollary to postwar American painting. Intentionally and hermetically sealed off from social, historical, and expressive modes, the paintings of such artists as Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, and Robert Mangold represent the moment at which formal concerns turned in upon themselves. At this time, when the medium served only to represent itself, art became one and the same as the structures and supports that comprised it. You Must Go On. I Can't Go On. I'll Go On. presents works by Martin, Stella, and Mangold next in proximity to several artists who responded to the call of Minimalism with Beckett's staunch declaration: I'll go on.
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