Intimate Infinite: Imagine A Journey invites visitors to become immersed in the work of artists who collapse the vastness of infinity into tangible dimensions through obsessive detail and concentrated mark making, the distilled intensity of small scale, or the tactile materiality of their surfaces. In its exploration of the sublime, the exhibition unfolds over all three levels of the gallery’s New York City landmark building, and includes nearly one hundred artworks.
In his first exhibition organized for the gallery, co-founder Brett Gorvy’s selection of paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures was inspired by William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.” Beginning on the gallery’s ground floor, viewers will first encounter a wall of Robert Ryman paintings of different scales and materiality, in direct conversation with three paintings by Cy Twombly, which include the stunning blackboard work Untitled (1967). The second floor focuses on artworks that demonstrate distinctive sensuality and sensitivity to material, featuring masterworks by the most influential female artists of the 1960s and 1970s in juxtaposition with those of their male peers.
Highlights include the bulging and stitched wall relief of Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1959), made from leather, canvas, welded steel rods, and wire, displayed in visual contrast to the inward movement of Jasper Johns’s White Target (1958). The third floor of Intimate Infinite is a meditation upon fantastical universes, including surreal landscapes by Yves Tanguy, such as Lumen (1949), and René Magritte’s La condition humaine (1935). These works are positioned alongside exquisitely executed box assemblages by Joseph Cornell and Lucas Samaras. This room will also feature seven butterfly works by Jean Dubuffet—the first time in New York that such a significant assembly of these rare and intricate collages will be shown together.