Archives: Exhibitions

Lévy Gorvy is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Tsuyoshi Maekawa, to be held in collaboration with Saatchi Gallery. It will be the inaugural presentation at Saatchi Gallery’s new project space, SALON, launching on 24 February 2017.

The exhibition will include a selection of paintings by the artist from the 1950s and ’60s, conveying both his unique sensibility and the remarkable energy of Gutai’s most productive period. Highlights include two works initially presented at Maekawa’s first solo exhibition at the Gutai Pinacotheca, Osaka, which took place in November 1963: Untitled (A5) (1963) and Mountain with Lines (1963). The latter comes from a grouping of important works on loan from Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, and once formed part of a monumental quadriptych whose other panels have since been lost.

Dominique Lévy previously held an exhibition of Maekawa’s works in New York in 2014. Tsuyoshi Maekawa will be held concurrently with an exhibition of fellow Gutai painter Kazuo Shiraga’s works at Lévy Gorvy’s Old Bond Street location (from 3 February – 25 March 2017). The gallery will also be collaborating with Axel Vervoordt Gallery for an exhibition of paintings by Shiraga at the latter’s new space in Antwerp, opening on March 8. By presenting simultaneous exhibitions by two Gutai masters across multiple venues in Europe, Lévy Gorvy will highlight the legacy of this influential avant-garde collective.

SALON at Saatchi Gallery will partner with major international galleries to present a wide platform dedicated to exhibiting work by established artists as well as artists’ estates in selling exhibitions.

Tsuyoshi Maekawa (b. 1936) was a member of the Gutai Art Association, Japan’s most significant avant-garde collective of the postwar era, founded in 1954. He was included in the 8th Gutai Exhibition at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in 1959, and became a protégé of the group’s founder, Jiro Yoshihara. Following Maekawa’s first solo exhibition at the Gutai Pinacotheca in November 1963, the artist was represented in every Gutai event until the group’s eventual dissolution following Yoshihara’s death in 1972.

Maekawa’s efforts during this time were profoundly occupied with the materiality and three-dimensionality of painting. The artist created a series of works using burlap, cutting the fabric apart and adhering it to canvas, which he then painted over to create a rich, heterogeneous, metamorphic surface. Here, Maekawa made the radically objective nature of painting emerge in all its strangeness. This artistic practice served to subvert the representational, opening an immediate access to the thing itself—the artwork as matter rather than image. Although these works find their place in a lineage of paintings created using unconventional materials such as burlap, as in the work of Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Alberto Burri, they also stand apart as evidence of a highly independent investigation into abstract texture and the visual relationship of the fluid materiality of the artistic medium with geographic and biomorphic forms.

Literally meaning ‘concrete’, the word Gutai was intended by Yoshihara to express the idea that art constitutes the embodied, material manifestation of human spiritual freedom. While often closely associated with the contemporaneous movements of Abstract Expressionism in the United States and Art Informel in France because of a shared exploration of performative painting, the multidisciplinary practice of Gutai artists pushed the boundaries between painting and performance, artwork and event, to such a degree that Allan Kaprow would praise the group as a pioneering force of the concept of the ‘Happening’ in Japan.

Maekawa has recently participated in a number of important group exhibitions, including Gutai: Splendid Playground, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013; Tàpies: The eye of the artist, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 2013; Art Osaka 2013, Hotel Granvia, Osaka, 2013; Gutai: The Spirit of an Era, The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2012; Nul = 0, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2011; Gutai Retrospective, Prefectural Museum of Art, Hyogo, 2004; and Gutai, Jeu de Paume National Gallery, Paris, 1999. His works can be found in several public collections, including: The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, Ashiya.

Saatchi Gallery and Huawei have teamed up to present From Selfie to Self-Expression. This is the world’s first exhibition exploring the history of the selfie from the old masters to the present day, and celebrates the truly creative potential of a form of expression often derided for its inanity.

The show also highlights the emerging role of the mobile phone as an artistic medium for self-expression by commissioning ten exciting young British photographers to create new works using Huawei’s newest breakthrough dual lens smartphones co-engineered with Leica.

In an age where painting has become one strand among many in contemporary art making, Painters’ Painters brings together a small group of distinctive figures in the field.

In recent years, painting has been challenged by the myriad of other modern media and technologies embraced by contemporary art. It is less frequently seen in contemporary museums and galleries today and is seemingly out of favour with many curators.

Painters’ Painters focuses on a group of artists who have been undeterred by the gradual decline in interest in this perennial art form.

Champagne Life celebrates the work of a constellation of female artists, and provides a rare and apposite moment to reflect on what it means to be a female artist working today.

Champagne Life suggests high living, prestige and affluence, qualities that have led to champagne’s appropriation into Hip-Hop culture as an indicator of success when artists transition from economically depressed ghetto to uptown highlife.

Applied here to an exhibition bringing together the work of 14 emerging women artists, the irony of the title is palpable and throws into contrast the reality of many long, cold, lonely hours working in the studio with the perceived glamour of the art world.

EXHIBITIONISM is the first international exhibition on The Rolling Stones.


Taking over the entire two floors of the Saatchi Gallery with 9 thematic galleries, EXHIBITIONISM combines over 500 original Stones’ artefacts, with striking cinematic and interactive technologies offering the most comprehensive and immersive insight into the band’s fascinating fifty year history.


From never before seen dressing room and backstage paraphernalia to rare instruments; original stage designs, iconic costumes, rare audio tracks and video footage; personal diaries; poster and album cover artwork; and unique wraparound cinematic experiences that celebrate every aspect of their careers. Centre stage is the musical heritage that took them from a London blues band in the early 1960s to inspirational cultural icons.


The Rolling Stones have shaped popular culture, often in their own image, and this exhibition will offer a unique perspective that only the band’s own archive can provide. Collaborations and work by a vast array of artists, designers, musicians and writers will be included – from Andy Warhol, Shepard Fairey, Alexander McQueen, and Ossie Clark to Tom Stoppard and Martin Scorsese.


EXHIBITIONISM will be promoted and presented by Australian company iEC (International Entertainment Consulting) with the full participation of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood.
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Pangaea II: New Art From Africa and Latin America features the work of 18 emerging artists who provide an expansive insight into the work being produced against the backdrop of present day complexities in their respective homelands.

Witnesses to the transformation of their societies, the artists working in these two distinctive regions are increasingly based within cities that are changing at an unprecedented rate. Their work employs a hybrid of traditional and contemporary techniques and materials, reflecting on social and political issues faced during this period of rapid urban and economic expansion.

Including sculpture, painting, installation and photography, Pangaea II: New Art From Africa and Latin America explores the diverse cultural influences and thriving creative practices in the two great continents that were once conjoined as the prehistoric landmass of Pangaea.

Taking its title from the prehistoric landmass comprised of Africa and America, this major survey reunites the two former sister continents by bringing together the work of 16 of their contemporary artists. The exhibition celebrates and explores the parallels between their distinctly diverse cultures and creative practices, as they begin to receive recognition in the increasingly globalised art world.

In Europe and USA, Modern Art has typically advanced through a constant renewal innovative ideas and movements. We are now experiencing an important shift as artists and collectors seek to explore new art in regions outside their immediate geographical and historic context for inspiration.

The desire by artists and their audiences to discover fresh influences from a broader body of work has been facilitated by newly forged commercial and political alliances and the increasing ease of international communication and transportation. Important art fairs and biennales emerging in nations previously considered on the periphery, coupled with the recent preoccupation of museums to broaden their Eurocentric collections, have led to art from further afield becoming part of an international narrative during a global awakening in the arts.

The exhibition features nine contemporary artists working in a variety of mediums. Far from being reductive, their work if often complex and diverse. They employ techniques from folk art, ideas from performance art and borrow the language of post-war abstract expressionism as readily as those of digitised computer motifs and popular culture. By adapting these different visual languages, the artists in Abstract America Today create an exciting range of work celebrating the legacy of Abstraction. Like America itself, their work is epic and expansive, loud and confident, reflecting the simultaneous brutality and romance of the big city and the big country.

The programme of exhibitions continues the Saatchi Gallery’s 25-year-long support of emerging artists and its drive to make contemporary art as widely accessible as possible. An entire floor has been devoted to exhibiting artists in the early stages of their careers, and enables young artists to have their work displayed in a museum environment. It also gives visitors to the Gallery a chance to discover some of the most exciting artists working in the UK.

New Order II: British Art Today features 13 artists who offer an arresting insight into art being made in the UK today. From sculpture and painting, to installation and video, this selection of artists employ a hybrid of traditional and contemporary techniques and materials, which revitalise existing visual languages.

Abstraction returns in the shape of interior décor in George Little’s paintings, with satirical intent in Dan Rees’ plasticine covered panels, or revived in unconventional and contrasting materials in Dominic Beattie’s pieces. Virgile Ittah’s wax figures droop as they succumb to Virgile Ittah, Regarding The Pain Of The Other, 2013 gravity; Finbar Ward’s paintings are stacked on the floor like minimalist sculptures; and the sensory and sonic are embodied in Hannah Perry’s immersive installation.