Frieze Masters - Lévy Gorvy

Frieze Masters

Regent's Park, London
October 14 - 18, 2015

Dominique Lévy is pleased to present a Frieze Masters booth dedicated to the contemporaneous movements of Gutai in Japan and ZERO in Europe. Both were pivotal groups in the postwar avant-garde, and worked to reimagine the parameters of painting, performance, and the artistic event. The artists involved in both Gutai and ZERO operated under an international sensibility, maintaining a dialogue across national boundaries long before the emergence of any conception of globalization. While the artworks on view vary greatly in style, the artists of ZERO and Gutai developed parallel artistic practices following the tenants that art may be manifested in all aspects of reality, and that the viewer’s presence must be implicated in the artistic process. This unity of artistic vision present in the different cultural environments of Germany and Japan was due in great part to the common experience of World War II, which saw humanity, culture, and civility reduced to abject annihilation. This literal and figurative zero hour, this “event that splits and shatters time” marked the end of a world that had previously resisted atomic warfare and destruction. Rather than viewing this coup de grâce as apocalyptic, the artists of both Gutai and ZERO chose to see it as a caesura, and the reinstitution of peace at the end of the war as a new beginning: a blank slate in which a new ethical order could be established and the remnants of the past could be transformed and resurrected under the aegis of a new worldview.

Dominique Lévy seeks to continue the international dialogue initiated by these artists over half a century ago, repositioning the works in another “open system,” further expanding their experiential potential to include the present moment. Through this curated selection of works, the scope of the ZERO and Gutai artists’ open-ended works is broadened to implicate and explore the prevailing issues in the art world today—from globalization to the intractable specter of the 20th century—as their works are exhibited in a new venue and viewed through an inescapably contemporary lens, to extend the dialogue they fueled between the artist, the work of art, and the viewer into the present.

 

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