Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy, co-founders of Lévy Gorvy, announced today that the gallery will host an international exhibition unfolding across its spaces in four world capitals—New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong—over the course of fall 2021, unveiling interconnected bodies of new work by acclaimed American artist Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, Camden, NJ). This multi-site presentation, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, will feature paintings, installations, and video works that expand Thomas’ decades-long exploration of the Black female body as a realm of power, eroticism, agency, and inspiration, and a vehicle for reformulating familiar visual idioms of modernism inherited from some of the 20th century’s most influential masters. Presented in uniquely designed environments for each of the four locations, Thomas’ exhibition will also include a video made in collaboration with her life partner and muse Racquel Chevremont, an art advisor, curator, and collector.
Beginning September 9, Lévy Gorvy’s landmark building in New York City will host the first of this progression, debuting Thomas’s latest large-scale Jet paintings—works that reclaim images from vintage Jet Magazine pin-up calendars—presented in a totalizing environment. Since its inception in 1952, Jet has played a central role in Black American life via its political and cultural coverage, including extensive attention to the Civil Rights movement, as well as its coverage of beauty and fashion trends spawned by the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1970s. The subjects of the Jet paintings are women featured in vintage issues of the magazine, recontextualized by Thomas through an array of material techniques, including silkscreen, oil and acrylic painting, and application of rhinestones, in a deft approach to collage that accentuates the historical quality of her distinctive visual language. While Thomas’ subjects are anonymous, she celebrates the beauty, strength, and individuality of these women in a way that honors their full ownership of their bodies and identities.