Artist: Domenico Gnoli

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli, the largest exhibition of works by the artist in the United States in more than five decades, following his celebrated 1969 solo presentation at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. Featuring paintings, drawings, etchings, notebooks, and letters, the survey represents a critical continuation of Gnoli’s legacy in America, subsequent to his major 2021–22 retrospective at the Fondazione Prada, Milan. We are proud to organize this exhibition in collaboration with Gnoli’s widow, Yannick Vu, and the artist’s estate—as well as to present works from the artist’s sister, Mimì Gnoli, and major private collections.

In his brief yet prolific life, Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970) established himself as a master of perception, creating a body of paintings unparalleled in their composition and meticulous detail. Born in Rome, he began his career as an illustrator and set and costume designer, working and traveling across the world while arriving to his mature style as a painter in 1964. His late paintings picture everyday objects— including clothing, hair, beds, and sofas—enlarged, fragmented, and suspended. The canvases are at once absorbing and uncanny, revealing secrets of contemporary life yet unconsidered.

Through the isolation of his subjects, Gnoli elevates and explores reality through detail, yielding figurative works that stand, in the words of Germano Celant, “at the limits of sensory perception.” Gnoli himself wrote of his method, “Would you call it surrealistic? Or abstract? I don’t know... All I know is that it’s a completely new theory about art, a new approach that makes the pictures appear just like life does...” While focused on what can be seen—as Gnoli described, “common objects, isolated from their usual context”—his paintings possess an aura that reaches beyond reality—exuding “a sense of order that approaches serenity, an almost monastic orderliness,” explains his partner and widow Yannick Vu. Gnoli in part achieves this atmosphere through the framing, magnification, and stillness of his subject matter, evoking the photographic. At the same time, he imbues his works with a distinguished materiality by incorporating sand into his pigments, creating encrusted surfaces that recall the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance.

Of his practice, Gnoli stated “I am metaphysical inasmuch as I search for a still and atmospheric, non-eloquent painting, one that takes static situations as its starting point. I am not metaphysical insofar as I have never sought to elaborate or fabricate an image. I always employ simple, given elements, I don’t want either to add or take anything away. I have never even wanted to deform; I isolate and represent. My themes come from the world around me, familiar situations, everyday life; because I never actively mediate against the object, I experience the magic of its presence.” Of his legacy, Yannick Vu writes, “With inexhaustible patience Gnoli wove and reinvented a new fabric to life, pursuing its essence behind the appearances of reality.”