Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties
18 September - 13 December 2025
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
19 East 64 Street
Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pleased to present Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties, a major survey exhibition organized in close collaboration with Mary Boone – "queen of the [1980s] New York art scene," as she was famously deemed by New York Magazine in an April 1982 cover story. Featured artists include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, Guerrilla Girls, Peter Halley, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cady Noland, Richard Prince, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinbach, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool.
The museum-style exhibition staging (across multiple floors of the gallery's landmarked Beaux-Arts townhouse) will channel the era's over-the-top excess. Downtown/Uptown will largely focus on two parallel tendencies of the 1980s New York art scene:
'Raw figuration and expressionist painting' will be represented by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, Keith Haring, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, and Julian Schnabel.
'Cool conceptualism and the art of appropriation' will include pivotal works by those such as Guerrilla Girls, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Cady Noland, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinbach, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool.
Additional artists of the era like Ross Bleckner, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andres Serrano will also be featured.
LGD partner Brett Gorvy, who conceived and is organizing the exhibition, provides the following context for the show:
"The 1980s New York arts scene was a thriving hub of pioneering creativity, artistic collaboration, and celebrity. The city itself became an important catalyst amongst artists, especially downtown areas such as SoHo and the East Village, where many of the studios, galleries, and several nightclubs were located. The 1980s art movements were eclectic, and there was an unprecedented pluralism of style that reflected a postmodernist tendency. Artists were thrust in the limelight of media celebrity, and the term “art star” emerged to describe this phenomenon. The AIDS epidemic and the social economics of the Reagan presidency had a huge impact on the community, as did the “greed is good” mentality of late-1980s Wall Street."
Read more in the press release linked here.
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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download web-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of the exhibition, with the credit lines as indicated in the file titles.
