Everyone Loves Picabia

Trey Abdella, Rita Ackermann, Barbara Bloom, John Cage, John Currin, Nancy Dwyer, Louis Eisner, Tomás Esson, Ravi Jackson, Lisa Jo, Martin Kippenberger, Claire Lehmann, Colette Lumiere, Mathieu Malouf, Charles Mayton, Jeanette Mundt, Francis Picabia, Philip Pearlstein, Jason Rhoades, Anita Steckel, Marika Thunder, Kyle Thurman, Christopher Williams, Lisa Yuskavage, Leah Ke Yi Zheng

To mark the 10th year of the gallery, David Lewis is proud to present Everyone Loves Picabia, a group exhibition which recalls the gallery’s roots in Lewis’s doctoral dissertation on French dadaist Francis Picabia. The Ph.D. (Francis Picabia and the Problem with Nihilism) sought to answer the question “why?” — why was Picabia, among all the artists of the historical avant-garde, so stylistically varied and endlessly adaptable to modes and methods of artmaking, however diverse, contradictory? (Just what is it that makes this avant-gardist so different, so appealing?) This anniversary exhibition extends the inquiry by presenting 5 works by Francis Picabia, alongside 24 contemporary artists, each of whom have been inspired by Picabia in a variety of ways: As an almost limitless repertoire of formal and conceptual techniques; a satirist, parodist and avatar of play; a protean but self-deprecating spirit of myriad possibilities and potentials. If critics still often struggle to make sense of Picabia’s achievement, and only intermittently embrace its profuse permissive gifts, artists, on the other hand, have definitely always gotten the message, celebrated it, and enthusiastically extended it. This exhibition gives voice to their energies and insights.