Lévy Gorvy Dayan Recreates the Dazzle of 1980s New York
Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties is a sweeping survey featuring a stellar roster of artists organized by Mary Boone
Lévy Gorvy Dayan is revisiting a decisive chapter in New York’s cultural history with Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties, a sweeping survey staged across its landmark Beaux-Arts townhouse on East 64th Street. The show is organized in collaboration with Mary Boone—immortalized by New York Magazine in the early ‘80s as “queen of the New York art scene.” A stellar roster of artists has been brought together whose careers both defined and upended the art world at a time when the city’s galleries, nightclubs, and lofts doubled as stages for artistic invention, extravagance and confrontation.
Two Currents in One Decade
Gallery partner Brett Gorvy, who spearheaded this show, describes the 1980s New York arts scene as a “thriving hub of pioneering creativity, artistic collaboration, and celebrity,” in which radically different approaches not only coexisted but often clashed. On one side was the raw energy of neo-expressionist painting—brash, emotional, and larger-than-life. Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, Francesco Clemente, and Kenny Scharf epitomized the painter-as-provocateur, their canvases echoing the era’s exuberance and instability.
In sharp contrast stood the practitioners of appropriation and conceptual critique, who interrogated mass media, consumerism, and gender politics. The Guerrilla Girls, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Andy Warhol, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Haim Steinbach, and Christopher Wool all feature here, their works reflecting the decade’s obsession with images and originality. Additional perspectives from artists such as Peter Halley, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ross Bleckner, and Andres Serrano underscore the decade’s tumultuous intersections of desire, mortality, and spectacle.
A Decade of Excess and Impact
The exhibition acknowledges the forces that shaped and shadowed the art world of the period: the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan-era ethos of wealth and deregulation, and the rise of the “art star” as a new cultural archetype. Boone’s involvement grounds these themes in lived history; her galleries in SoHo and Uptown were arenas where many of these movements—and rivalries—played out in real time.
Immersive Museum-Style Staging
True to the spirit of the decade, the exhibition embraces performance and theatricality awhile retaining curatorial rigor—a museum-style presentation that mirrors the decade’s own over-the-top allure. Visitors can expect to encounter both iconic works and rediscoveries that resonate anew in today’s cultural climate. Do not miss taking the elevator, where you can practice your dance moves while listening to a custom disco soundtrack.
With works spanning multiple floors and moods, the exhibition offers not just a retrospective of iconic figures, but a reframing of New York in the 1980s—as a place where artistic ambition fed directly off the city’s volatility, excess, and intensity.
Downtown/Uptown is on view through December 13