Is it the back of a woman’s dress? I wonder, standing before a cherry-red painting by Domenico Gnoli at Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
It’s not until I step several feet away from the canvas, an over-five-foot square, that I realize the work depicts a tie knot, ultra-cropped and punched in until it’s almost abstracted. Up close, I’m captivated by the rhythmic, perfectly rendered lines of the ribbed fabric. Under the late Italian artist’s hand, this mundane object evokes a sculpture, akin to paintings by Park Seo-Bo, in which repeated pencil lines are carved into a still-wet surface, producing three-dimensional texture.
That meticulous trompe-l’oeil effect is just one of countless tricks that Gnoli had up his sleeve, as evidenced in the survey at Lévy Gorvy Dayan—the largest American exhibition of Gnoli’s œuvre since 1969. Over the short course of his life (Gnoli was just 36 when he died from cancer in 1970), the Roman-born artist achieved great success as an illustrator of children’s books and magazines including Sports Illustrated and Life; a costume and set designer; and ultimately as a painter of a singular, totally timeless style, variously conjuring Surrealism, Pop art, and Arte Povera. With “The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli,” Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents 17 exemplary paintings, as well as rarely seen drawings, etchings, notebooks, letters, and ephemera, from the height of Gnoli’s career, between 1965 and 1969. Given there are only 160 to 170 mature paintings of Gnoli’s in existence, most of which are held in private collections, it was no easy feat to put these works together.
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“Gnoli’s collectors are usually very reluctant to let his works go, even as loans,” Amalia Dayan, who jointly runs the gallery with Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy, tells Vogue. Many of his pieces either remain in their original owners’ hands or have been passed down through their families. “There is the cult of Gnoli,” Dayan goes on. “Once you delve in, and you understand his complex universe, it becomes an obsession.” Her own obsession formed over a decade ago, when she presented Gnoli shows in 2012 and 2018 with her former gallery, Luxembourg & Dayan (now Luxembourg + Co.).
Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s new exhibition required close collaboration with Gnoli’s estate, which includes the Domenico Gnoli Archives, Majorca—led by the artist’s widow, Yannick Vu, and her current husband, Ben Jakober, who was a fellow artist and Gnoli’s close friend—and the Archivio Domenico Gnoli, Rome, led by the artist’s sister, Mimì Gnoli, and Livia Polidoro-Gnoli Archive.
