Installation view of Luxembourg & Dayan at Art Basel 2018.
Photo: Annik Wetter.
LUXEMBOURG & DAYAN ANNOUNCES TRIBUTE TO ALBERTO BURRI AT ART BASEL UNLIMITED
Gallery’s Art Basel Fair Booth Will Trace Post-War Breakthroughs and Movements
Luxembourg & Dayan is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel 2018 with a presentation of post-war European masterworks. Reflecting the gallery’s critically acclaimed program and its commitment to figures whose aesthetic experiments and technical breakthroughs have shaped the course of art history, the presentation will feature works by Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Domenico Gnoli, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Martin Kippenberger, Salvatore Scarpitta, and Piero Manzoni, each of whom radically expanded the limits of artistic inquiry.
Anchoring the booth will be Pouce (thumb), a monumental bronze sculpture by César. Part of a series that began with a cast by the artist from his own body, Pouce invites meditation upon the role of authorship and persona in viewers’ experience of art, and slyly critiques Minimalist tropes.
Collectively, works on view in the stand suggest provocative connections within the constellation of 20th century movements, from Surrealism and Nouveau réalisme to Arte Povera, Fluxus, and American Minimalism. Additional works by Gino de Domenicis, Ed Ruscha, and Egon Schiele will also be part of Luxembourg & Dayan’s presence at Art Basel.
UNLIMITED: ALBERTO BURRI. CELLOTEX
Extending the gallery’s longtime engagement with the work of Italian titan Alberto Burri, Luxembourg & Dayan will present the artist’s coveted black Cellotex works at this year’s Unlimited sector with a presentation simulating the artist’s own now-fa- mous exhibition of this seminal cycle of works, which debuted in 1991 at Città di Castello.
A lesser-known part of the artist’s oeuvre, but one that he considered seminal, the Cellotex series suggests the less explored connections between Burri, a consummate innovator and abstractionist, and the masters whose achievements in earlier centu- ries continue to exert a profound in uence upon art. Reaching beyond painting’s conventional limits to give art a brave new repertoire, Burri was against image, interpretation, and all things except the rectilinear shape of a painting. Such fierce lyricism and technical focus reach an apotheosis in the Cellotex works.