Intimate Infinite: Imagine a Journey (2018) invited visitors to become immersed in the work of artists who collapse the vastness of infinity into tangible dimensions through obsessive detail, concentrated mark-making, the distilled intensity of small scale, or the tactile materiality of their surfaces. The exhibition unfolded over all three levels of Lévy Gorvy, New York, and included nearly one hundred works. Intimate Infinite: Imagine a Journey was the first exhibition organized for the gallery by cofounder Brett Gorvy. William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence” inspired his selection of paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”

Viewers first encountered a wall of Robert Ryman paintings of different scales and materiality in conversation with three paintings by Cy Twombly, including the stunning blackboard work Untitled (1967). The second floor demonstrated distinctive sensuality and sensitivity to material, featuring works by the most influential female artists of the 1960s and 1970s in juxtaposition with those of their male peers. Highlights included the bulging and stitched wall relief of Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1959), made from leather, canvas, welded steel rods, and wire, displayed in visual contrast to the inward movement of Jasper Johns’s White Target (1958). The third floor of Intimate Infinite was a meditation upon fantastical universes, including surreal landscapes by Yves Tanguy, such as Lumen (1949) and René Magritte’s La condition humaine (1935). These works were positioned alongside exquisitely executed box assemblages by Joseph Cornell and Lucas Samaras. The final room featured seven butterfly works by Jean Dubuffet—the first time such a significant assembly of these rare and intricate collages was shown together in New York.