Luxembourg & Dayan Presents DOMINICO GNOLI: BEDS, Now thru 6/22

By: Jun. 19, 2014
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For its first participation at Art Basel, Luxembourg & Dayan is pleased to present the curated exhibition DOMENICO GNOLI: BEDS, a selection of paintings executed over the course of the celebrated Italian artist's brief life.

Domenico Gnoli (1933 - 1970) made canvases in which the characteristics of Pop and Surrealism conflate, and the relationship between identity and surface is in constant, provocative flux. Everyday objects and sights - shoes, patterned shirts, the part in a head of hair - freight the artist's work with mystery and poignancy. Luxembourg & Dayan's exhibition in Basel focuses upon one of the most significant among the artist's recurring motifs: the bed.

Hovering between abstraction and figuration, Gnoli's beds seem at once abandoned and occupied. The textures and patterns of their bedspreads are rendered in fetishistic detail across lovers' bodies and empty mattresses. Recalling both the perspectival foreshortening and metaphysical concerns of Mantegna's 15th-century masterpiece The Lamentation of Christ, Gnoli's bed paintings capture an interlude when the body is suspended between life and death, where disrupted bedclothes are signifiers of loss.

Though Domenico Gnoli's career was tragically abbreviated, this suite of works presented by Luxembourg & Dayan offers a view into the power of the several dozen mature canvases he left behind at the time of his death. Deeply personal and profoundly invested in the concept of an open painterly narrative, Gnoli's bed paintings offer both the tender melancholy and technical mastery synonymous with his art.

DOMENICO GNOLI: BEDS will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring a text by prominent writer and long-time museum director Guy Tosatto. Tosatto wrote his doctoral dissertation on Domenico Gnoli and is currently the director of the Musée de Grenoble.

 

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