Yudith Levin

‘The fetishism of impoverished materials, an articulate and characteristic feature in Israeli art of the last twenty years - especially the plywood fetishism - reaches an unprecedented development in Yudith Levin’s work. This is plywood’s ‘finest hour’. The first step in Yudith Levin’s method of working is collecting used pieces of plywood from the streets of Tel Aviv. The collection and accumulation ultimately lead to the creation of composite works whose plywood components vary in degree of deterioration. Plywood is no longer a support on which to work, or, to be more exact, is no longer merely a support. It is a significant means of expression, a vehicle for conveying the way of the Levin world. Yudith Levin has turned the plywood pieces into a rich fund of emotions, a host of metaphors. The plywood fragments are broken and weak, crumbly and vulnerable. Alternatively, they are pliant, enduring and tough. The vocabulary of psychological imagery associated with the abstract brushstroke and abandoned with the shift to plywood has thus reappeared with Levin’s work through ‘the plywood condition’.

Placing the pieces of plywood on the wall makes them a border-genre, a form of sculpture-relief-painting. The works are composed of plywood fragments rising from the floor and barely touching each other. There is no picture ‘square’ as an autonomous world, but a dependent, fragmentary world only partly perceptible where Yudith Levin does a conjuring act, achieving harmony between the fragments. In principle, this is the representation of Levin’s modern world view. Her structures join line of ways of representing an incoherent, modern world.’

 

Sarah Breitberg-Semel -Curator, Israeli Art, Tel Aviv Museum