Lévy Gorvy Dayan has announced the relocation of their London space to 35 Dover Street in Mayfair, opening April 25th, 2024. The inaugural show will be a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist N. Dash, her first UK solo show.
N. Dash’s debut exhibition with the gallery will feature multi-panel paintings that explore ecologies of resonance among disparate materials. N. Dash’s practice is grounded in and distinguished by bringing together organic substances, manufactured readymade objects, and images resulting from embodied processes. The tactile surfaces of these restrained, luminous works emphasize haptic experience, drawing attention to the subtle yet seismic effects of touch.
N. Dash’s paintings draw on the building blocks of our natural and constructed worlds, including earth and water, jute and cotton, graphite and oil, along with oft-overlooked fabricated items such as architectural insulation and factory-produced cardboard. Across the works in the exhibition, these elements are recombined to elevate the structural, textural, and energetic synergies and tensions among them. A work whose hue resembles patinated copper might comprise Styrofoam insulation, or an image might be silkscreened onto a panel on which earth has been troweled and dried into a cracked, furrowed plane. There are slippages among the many materials, processes, and signifiers that are evoked in these paintings—each held together by careful, spare decisions.
At the core of N. Dash’s work is a daily ritual wherein the artist rubs a small piece of white cotton between finger and thumb until the machine-loomed fibers fray and lose their gridded structure, decomposing into an abject tangle. For the artist, the fabric serves as a recording device on which actions are imprinted, energy is captured, and immaterial forces are stored. The resulting sculptures are colored by a patina of dirt and oils, transformed by the spontaneous movement of the artist’s body. The grid, one of modernism’s paradigmatic forms, is undone again and again in the artist’s hand—by the body, the weather, and the environment. The artist photographs iterations of these sculptures and silkscreens the images onto panels prepared with earth, such that the images undulate according to the earth’s topography. In addition, planes of color are silkscreened, leaving fields of rosette patterns that result from the halftone printing process.
35 Dover Street was historically home to the exclusive Empress Club, one of the first women-only members’ clubs in London. Queen Victoria inaugurated the Empress Club in 1897. Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s main viewing room will be located in the club’s former grand ballroom.
The Empress Club boasted notable members, from Princess Bamba Duleep Singh and her daughters to important promoters for women’s equal rights and suffrage such as Lady Leila Treacher. During the First World War, the club was involved with charity work, with its members gathering donations and offering space for soldiers and refugees. The women coming through the club’s doors sought modern luxuries and a space to share general and political interests. Its elegant parties attracted luminaries from wide and far, including Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, and Orson Welles in 1951.
N. Dash, April 25th – June 12th, 2024, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 35 Dover Street, London
