Galerie Gmurzynska – Special Presentation: Theo van Doesburg
“The Sistine Chapel of Abstract Art”
TEFAF Maastricht | Booth 404
At this year’s TEFAF Maastricht a special part of Galerie Gmurzynska’s booth will be exclusively designed around a work of seminal importance for 20th Century Art and Architecture. A work that has never before been available. A work that was part of a project which has been referred to by scholars such as Hans Haug, founder of the Musée de Strasbourg as “The Sistine Chapel of Abstract Art.”
The Color design has been extensively exhibited (with several front-page reviews, recently at the Whitechapel Gallery in London) and only a handful other drawings are now in museum collections such as the MoMA, the Centre George Pompidou, and the Nieuwe Institute in Rotterdam. None of the drawings are in private hands.
The Color design is documented in depth with historic photographs of the work in the office set up by van Doesburg at Place Kléber in Strasbourg while working at the project, and featured in the catalogue raisonné as well as in many publications.
In keeping with the caliber of unique historical finds, Galerie Gmurzynska will also be presenting the late Robert Indiana’s Red Sails from 1963. This monumental painting was the first ever object painting in the artist’s career. Withheld from the market for decades, and once thought to have been lost, this painting was only known to the public for its scholarly inclusion in all of Indiana’s monographs.
As the first painting with representational imagery in his career, this work should be considered with immense interest for the young artist’s development. A symbolic portrait of his father, referencing one of his father’s favorite songs, “Red Sails in the Sunset,” a crooning love song and connection to the artist’s love of the sea. Red Sails was so important to Indiana that decades after painting it and rediscovering it in a private collection at a dinner party, the artist spent hours transfixed, staring at the work’s many layers of meaning and significance.
This Pop masterpiece is one descendent of the colorful hard-edge geometric abstraction pioneered by Van Doesburg in his Aubette project. This and other bold connections between 20th century masters are only to be made at Galerie Gmurzynska’s booth at TEFAF Maastricht, designed by Tom Postma.