In The Neo-Classical Reimagined, presented by DTR Modern Galleries, the celebrated artist Gregg LeFevre invites us into a dimensional dialogue with history itself. This exhibition transcends aesthetics. It is a meditation on classical ideals, refracted through the fractured mirror of contemporary consciousness.
LeFevre, renowned for his expansive public art commissions, such as New York’s iconic Library Walk, brings to this body of work a scholar’s sensibility and a sculptor’s instinct. These mixed-media wall reliefs—what he has coined “Wrinks”—are not merely beautiful. They are ontological provocations. They collapse time, question perception, and reframe the legacy of Western sculpture within the shifting architectures of the digital age.
Central to this exhibition is the artist’s reinterpretation of The Three Graces—mythological symbols of charm, creativity, and joy that have graced the canons of Greco-Roman and Neoclassical art for millennia. From the sinuous marble of Canova to Botticelli’s lyrical restraint, these figures represent not only divine femininity but the human aspiration for grace itself.
In LeFevre’s hands, however, the Graces are no longer pristine. They are cropped, wrinkled, and reconfigured. Their disruption becomes their agency. Their classical perfection is neither idolized nor destroyed but examined—reanimated through distortion and layered symbolism.
LeFevre’s manipulation of surface—his wrinkled vinyl prints, rhinestone interventions, and the interplay between photographic flatness and sculptural dimensionality—functions as both formal experimentation and philosophical metaphor. These reliefs compel us to question the nature of truth in representation. The tension between real and artificial, original and reproduction, resonates deeply in a cultural moment defined by algorithmic image-making and mediated identity.
Historically, the Neo-Classical revival of the 18th and 19th centuries was not merely an aesthetic choice—it was a moral one. Artists and intellectuals sought to return to ideals of rational order, civic virtue, and philosophical harmony. To engage with those ideals today is to interrogate their meaning amid contemporary crises of surveillance, simulation, and spectacle.
LeFevre confronts these issues with subtlety and intellectual force, drawing a through-line from Da Vinci’s pointing machines and Canova’s marble transcriptions to modern facial recognition software. What began as a method of anatomical precision now surveils identity in databases. LeFevre’s glass cabochons stand in for those early “points,” suggesting that what once defined form now defines control.
The Neo-Classical Reimagined is not a nostalgic project. It does not seek refuge in antiquity. Rather, it interrogates the uses and misuses of the classical tradition, and it reclaims the feminine body—not as muse or ideal—but as a contested, dynamic, and vital space of meaning. The resulting works are simultaneously intimate and monumental. They challenge the viewer to participate in the act of seeing—to move around them, to absorb their texture, to consider their conceptual density.
It is no coincidence that these works reside on the wall. Their placement evokes both the domestic and the devotional, collapsing the distance between the gallery and the sanctuary. This spatial repositioning echoes the very thesis of the show: that sculpture, though historically tethered to the heroic and the monumental, can reside quietly in the interior—without losing its power. Indeed, perhaps that is where its power is most fully realized.
Large Drape 2 (Roman General)DTR Modern Galleries
DTR Modern Galleries will debut this significant new body of work by Gregg LeFevre. Long a shaper of civic space, LeFevre now turns inward, offering collectors and scholars alike a deeply considered, materially innovative, and culturally urgent collection.
For those engaged in the acquisition of contemporary art with historical continuity and intellectual rigor, The Neo-Classical Reimagined presents an opportunity to claim a piece of that ongoing dialogue—a tangible artifact of our time’s complex relationship to history, form, and myth.
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