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Ra’anan Levy Artwork
Description This
intimate, deeply atmospheric etching showcases Ra'anan Levy’s mastery of
intaglio printmaking and dramatic chiaroscuro The composition
centers around a pale, brightly illuminated woman with prominent textured hair
sitting with crossed arms in a shadowy interior Behind and
beside her, shadowy figures emerge from dense black cross-hatching and tonal
aquatint Subject ·
Primary
Subject: A tightly
grouped gathering or café/interior scene featuring a central female figure
surrounded by specter-like observers or companions ·
Setting: An enclosed, shadowy architectural
space with subtle cross-beams and geometric framing in the background Style &
Movement ·
Style:
Contemporary Figurative Realism / Intaglio Graphic Art ·
Movement:
Post-War Israeli-French Figurative Expressionism, influenced by European Old
Master printmaking traditions and Modernist existential realism Themes &
Motifs ·
Chiaroscuro & Light: Strong contrast between deep velvety blacks and luminous
uninked paper highlights ·
Isolation & Presence: Psychological intimacy paired with emotional distance
among figures sharing a single space
·
Old Master Resonance: Homage to 17th-century etching traditions (Rembrandt) and
19th-century psychological caricature/grotesque (Goya) Artist Name: Ra’anan Levy Signature Description: Plate Size: 25 x 20 cm / Sheet Size: 57 x 38 cm
Artist's Biography: Ra'anan Levy, painter, born 1954,
Jerusalem. Born in Jerusalem in 1954 into a Syrian
Jewish family, Levy's grandfather worked as a newspaper manager in Damascus.
He returned to Jerusalem in 1979,
where he enrolled in the Department of General History and History of Muslim Countries
at the Hebrew University between 1980-1982. This international trajectory could not have suited Ra’anan better.
For in all these ports of call, rich slices of the history of art were
absorbed. Gericault, Ingres, David and other giants of eighteenth and
nineteenth century French painting, the Dutch Masters Hals, Rembrandt and
Vermeer, the many inestimable artists of the Italian Renaissance and even
antiquities of his own Oriental heritage fed and fueled his urge to produce his
own personal body of work. In 2006, the Musée Maillol organized the first
retrospective dedicated to Levy's works, which was exhibited at numerous
museums around the world, including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Russian
Museum, and the Janos Gat Gallery. Studies 1975-1978 Studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome
and Florence. Solo exhibitions Group exhibitions 1987 Beit Uri and Rami Nehushtan Museum, Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov Meuhad Public collections Awards Born in Israel, Ra'anan Levy studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and printmaking at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Progressing in series, Levy followed his first Sink canvases (1976) by Sewer Drains, Common Objects, Spaces, and also more classic themes by Nudes and Portraits. Winner of the Eugene Kolb award for engraving, he demonstrated his expertise of the craft in his Self Portraits of galling dimensions. Sinks and Spaces follows two immensely successful Ra'anan Levy retrospectives: The Double Room at the Musée Maillol in Paris where he lives and works, and The Poetics of Space at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. By questioning the obvious, Ra'anan Levy creates a world that seems to
literally come alive. His old master technique allows for a kind of painting in
which every stroke reflects on the figurative, and where the inanimate conforms
to human anatomy. Levy's stainless steel Sinks are smooth surfaces that conceal
an invisible element, just as skin conceals the inside of the human body. Levy
is by turns physician and painter: the desire to transfer the inside to the
outside is the fundamental impulse that underlies his entire oeuvre. Levy's allegorical process intensifies in Spaces. The eye believes what it
sees, and what it sees is the alignment of a corridor that lays out various
directions, a sort of descriptive literature of the private dwelling. An
apartment offers a complex construction of vertical and horizontal lines that
intersect or overlie one another. The empty, doleful, and deserted bears the
traces of time, just like a photograph that freezes forever that which is only
fleeting. But the wooden floors bear reddish traces, like physiological tissues
with veins showing through them, while nervures seem to cross the grain of the
wood. The walls, made out of plaster, look like bony cavities. Each new canvas
is the pretext for a new journey into a world where optical illusions transform
the mineral into the organic, while the vision of the empty space suggests the
presence of an absent body. Ra'anan Levy's first exhibition in New York is accompanied by an illustrated
catalog with text by Musée Maillol curator, Bertrand Lorquin. Additional Information: RA’ANAN LEVY / L’épreuve du miroir (The Mirror Test) at the Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul de Vence, France
December 7, 2019 – March 8, 2020 Between 7 December 2019 and 8 March 2020, the Fondation Maeght presents
"L'épreuve du miroir" ("The Mirror Test"), an exhibition
devoted to the pictorial world of Ra'anan Levy, in which curator Hervé
Lancelin, a close friend of the artist and familiar with his work, assembles
around thirty of Levy's paintings and a number of his prints, which will be
placed alongside the Fondation Maeght's own collections. The French-Israeli artist consistently depicts
idiosyncratically chosen fragments of everyday reality, thereby asserting his
personal style while exploring his favourite themes: the configuration of
space, the passage of time, the absence of people, the presence of objects,
inhabited and uninhabited spaces, the play of visual perception and imagination
transforming everyday life into a strange new reality. The principle that can be seen in Ra’anan Levy’s work, acting as its guiding thread, is AMBIGUITY. On one hand, the works that represent plenitude to the point of BULIMIA, such as worktables and studios full of useful or useless objects, or the paintings depicting libraries flooded with piles of books discarded in all directions.
On the other, subjects that are practically ANOREXIC in their sparseness, such
as empty rooms and apartments, or fragments of mirrors. The element that links
such contrasting subjects is simple: if we look at the pots of paint on the worktables,
we see that they are always open, inviting us to enter, like Alice entering
wonderland, a labyrinth of empty rooms and mirrors. There is always an opening
inviting the viewer to enter. Ra’anan Levy was born in 1954 in Jerusalem. He
now lives and works in Paris and Florence. Studying visual art in Italy at the
Academia di Belle Arti in Rome and Florence and the Santa Reparata Graphic Art
Center from 1975 to 1979, and history at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem (in the history department and the history of Muslim countries
department) from 1980 to 1983, Ra’anan Levy took up a three-year residency
at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 1983 to 1986
thanks to a postgraduate grant from the Dutch government. In 1987, he
settled in Paris, having received a grant from the Fondation de France. Ra’anan
Levy’s work has been exhibited in Paris, London, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, St
Petersburg, Zürich and New York. His major solo exhibitions include:
"Ra’anan Levy: Works on Paper" (exhib. cat.) in 1997 at the Tel Aviv
Museum of Art, "Ra’anan Levy, la chambre double" (exhib. cat.) at the
Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol in Paris in 2006, an exhibition presented
at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2007 under the title "Ra’anan Levy: The
Poetics of Space" (exhib. cat.), and "Ra’anan Levy, Passages du
temps" (exhib. cat.) at the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol in Paris
in 2012. Ra’anan Levy received the Chevalier des Arts et des
Lettres award in 2013.
Galerie Dina Vierny is pleased to present the exhibition “Ra’anan Levy –
Engravings” which follows the exhibition of recent works by the artist, shown
in the fall of 2020. For this new hanging, the gallery brings together a selection of 31
prints made for nearly 10 years at the ARTE printing press and targets a
little-known part of the artist’s work, that of a frantic search towards the
subtle elaboration of his large canvases. With a certain taste for the creative
process and the monochrome which perfectly serves the dramatic effect of his
pictorial approach, Ra’anan Levy explores the recurring themes treated to the
point of obsession for more than a decade: mirrors, empty interiors, portraits
and self-portraits, manholes, books, hands, nudes… Here, he exhausts the motif
and uses a technique which allows to consider several states and possibilities,
thus authorizing all the repetitions and all the novelties. Rich, daring and
complex, his engravings mix various processes such as drypoint, aquatint,
etching, or scraper … Like a magician, Ra’anan Levy plays with these tools to
create intense and dark sets where dreams and realities are fragmented. In the
lineage of Piranesi, Borges or Rembrandt, he gives birth to real little worlds
of inner poetry.
07 JUIN 2022 | PAR JANE SEBBAR A l’âge de 68 ans, l’artiste israélien
Ra’anan Levy est décédé le 3 juin dernier à Paris. Un artiste cosmopolite qui
interroge la fugacité du temps et traque la réalité ordinaire. Ra’anan Levy laisse derrière lui une oeuvre foisonnante qui trouve un écho dans le monde entier. Paris, Londres, Tel Aviv, Jérusalem, Saint-Pétersbourg, Zurich et New York. Découvert par le public français lors de sa première rétrospective en France au Musée Maillol à la fin de l’année 2006, ses peintures sobres aux couleurs pures rencontrent rapidement un grand enthousiasme, ce qui lui vaut le titre de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres décerné par le ministère de la Culture en 2013. La fugacité du temps qui passe Une aventure obsessionnelle Une esthétique de l’ambiguïté Payment Methods: Shipping&Handling: All items are sent through registered mail or by E.M.S. Fast delivery service (up to 4-5 business days), depends on the weight and measures of the purchased item. You may add insurance for the item with an additional fee. Please e-mail us for other shipping methods. Combined Shipping: We will combine shipping and packaging to minimize costs and help you save on orders with multiple items. In case that the frame includes a glass, the item will be shipped without the glass in order to prevent any damage to the artwork caused by broken glass: be aware that such kind of a damage is not covered by the insurance! |
