Lévy Gorvy presents FOCUS: Agnes Martin, an exhibition that will place the artist’s sole completed film, Gabriel (1976), in conversation with an intimate selection of her abstract paintings.
At 22 Old Bond Street, a screening room and an adjoining gallery of paintings will create an immersive, meditative environment that will highlight the relationship between Martin’s work and her conception of joy. “I thought my movie was going to be about happiness,” Martin commented on the production of the film, “but when I saw it finished, it turned out to be about joy–the same thing my paintings are about.” The exhibition will mark the second of the FOCUS series, which encourages sustained contemplation of landmark artworks by artists rooted in the gallery’s programme, alongside related selections from their oeuvres.
Innocent vision
Shot in colour and without a script, Gabriel loosely follows its titular subject, a fourteen-year-old boy, as he wanders through rural landscapes of New Mexico, California, and Colorado; Martin herself lived and worked in New Mexico during this period. Rejecting a linear storyline, the film presents a portrait of joy through fragmented visions of the landscape interspersed with detailed shots of wildflowers billowing in the wind and a foaming stream in perpetual movement.
Unmediated joy
This exhibition seeks to draw out the parallels between the unadulterated joy expressed in Gabriel and the sublime serenity of Martin’s classic geometric paintings from the mid to late 1960s.
| Duration | 22 February 2019 - 13 April 2019 |
| Times | Tuesday–Saturday 10–6 |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Levy Gorvy |
| Address | 22 Old Bond Street, London, W1S 4PY |
| Contact | 4402036965910 / info@levygorvy.com / http://www.levygorvy.com/ |