NYAB Event - Jill Levine “Wall Drawings”

Jill Levine “Wall Drawings”

Hionas Gallery LES

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Hionas Gallery presents Jill Levine: Wall Drawings, comprising a selection of new and varied works from the acclaimed artist, including gouache drawings, wall-mounted sculpture, and site-specific geometric murals painted onto the gallery walls. This is Levine’s second solo show with Hionas in as many years.

Levine’s new body of work is presented here in four stages, defined by incremental gradations of scale countered by a gradually simplified compositional style. These stages begin with an accordion book filled with thirty 3x3 in. drawings, produced in sequence, each one a colorful hybrid of an architectural blueprint and an angular rendition of a Mayan glyph. Levine has encoded within each of these small-scale structures certain anatomical elements—hands, eyes, skull—that take care not to disrupt her carefully composed linear gestures. The second stage is an abbreviated selection of 5x7 in. drawings, wherein Levine lends her symmetrical figures more intricacy, more organic unity, and a greater landscape to inhabit.

From there Levine’s linear patterns evolve into curvilinear lines that populate her three-dimensional sculpture. These animalistic protoforms—made from disparate Styrofoam pieces covered in plaster-dipped gauze, modeling compound and oil paint—are voluptuous glyphs in their own right, and painted in such ways as to almost conceal their overall symmetry.

Wall Drawings’ fourth stage is its namesake, represented by three large-scale murals to be produced on-site specifically for this exhibition. Their clearly defined color fields will assume a geometric harmony on the gallery walls, and when juxtaposed with the preceding three stages, reveal themselves as skeletal accounts of Levine’s glyphs-born-of-blueprint. Throughout this chronological exploration of scale, dimensions, and the meeting of organic and inorganic forms, Levine creates a stored language and visual folklore that is without precedent.

Jill Levine is a native New Yorker. She attended Queens College, where she earned her BA and also received a fellowship to the Yale Summer School of Art at Norfolk, CT. She earned her MFA from the Yale University School of Art, which included a semester at the Royal College of Art in London. She has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1970s in both group and solo exhibitions. In 2000 she was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2005 a NYFA Fellowship. Her sculpture is included among numerous private and corporate collections worldwide as well as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Art Embassies, Mumbai Embassy. She lives and works in New York.