Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pleased to announce the first New York exhibition with Chinese painter Tu Hongtao, opening February 22, 2024, at 19 East 64th Street. Tu Hongtao: Beyond Babel presents sweeping compositions in sumptuous hues that advance the artist’s use of abstraction as a means to engage with memory, landscape, and society, as well as art history, theory, and poetry. Introducing more than thirty new works, the exhibition unveils significant developments in Tu’s practice since his first exhibition in 2020 with the gallery in Hong Kong.

The exhibition’s title indicates a key source of inspiration for Tu’s most recent body of work. Paraphrasing the literary theorist George Steiner’s study After Babel, published in 1975, “Beyond Babel” represents our contemporary moment and our reliance on technology to communicate—at the possible expense of more distinctive forms of expression and connection. Tu has explored landscape and abstraction since the early 2010s. His paintings that will debut at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York, reveal a new commitment to storytelling as a response to current modes of artificial intelligence and data collection. The power of imagination and personal association—conceived by the artist as counterforces—are central to the conception of the works on view.