Conversation at Dvir Gallery

Artists: Miroslaw Balka, Yudith Levin

Exhibition title: Conversation

Venue: Dvir Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

Date: January 8 – February 19, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Dvir Gallery

Dvir Gallery is proud to present ‘Conversation’, a duo exhibition of historical works by Miroslaw Balka and Yudith Levin. Although the ouvre of the two artists look very different, there is an uncanny kindship to their practice. Both have mastered the art of reduction in search of essence.

Miroslaw Balka

Miroslaw Balka was born in 1958 in Warsaw, Poland where he lives and works. Comprising installation, sculpture and video, Balka’s work has a bare and elegiac quality that is underlined by the careful, minimalist placement of objects, as well as the gaps and pauses between them. Balka’s work deals with both personal and collective memories, especially as they relate to his Catholic upbringing and the collective experience of Poland’s fractured history. Through this investigation of domestic memories and public catastrophe, he explores how subjective traumas are translated into collective histories and vice versa. His materials are simple, everyday objects and things, but also powerfully resonant of ritual, hidden memories and the history of Nazi occupation in Poland.

Miroslaw Balka uses height, gravity, distance, and continuous space in order to approach the necessity of understanding remembrance and memory itself. He brings the viewer in to a position of experience and absorption and as less of an observer and more of a witness. Realizing the importance behind sculptures relative to monuments and memorials, embracing fear and crossing thresholds, approaching an infinite search; whether it is to escape, or find the missing pieces/ letters in order to reach an understanding. Balka creates a space where it is pertinent to acknowledge what it means to remember.

His solo exhibitions include amongst many others Tate Turbin Hall, London; Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuelle Kunst, Ghent, Belgium; Museum of Contemporary Art, Strasbourg; Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo,; Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland.

Yudith Levin

Born in Israel in 1949, Yudith Levin lives and works in Ein Vered. Levin is considered one of the key figures in Israeli art.

Over an artistic career spanning over more than four decades, Yudith Levin has been creating paintings on both traditional and untraditional supports, covering canvases as well as scraps of discarded plywood found on the streets of Tel Aviv with expressive, gestural brushstrokes and semi- abstract figures and landscapes. By combining abstraction and figuration and using deliberately vague titles, Levin makes evocative works that are open to varied readings.

How was this first series of Yudith Levin’s figurative painting created?

This is answered by the famous myth about the beginning of painting. It is worth exploring this myth in the context of Levin since she confronts the viewer with a borderline painting – in-between nothingness and a whole universe, between chaos and diamond, between a dump and flight. One of the places where Levin’s work deviates from the rational is the lack of distinction between figurative and abstract. Her figurative paintings are created like abstract paintings, from gestures which are not underlain by any figurative plan or intention.

Levin’s woman figures originate in female figures from paintings by Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Michael Angelo, as well as from popular sources, among them characters from television soap operas.

Her exhibitions include Helena Rubinstein Pavillion for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv, Museum of Contemporary art Ramat Gan; The ICA Boston, Massachusetts; Gallerie Knodedler, Zurich; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Opera House, Leipzig and others.Her work is part of prestigious public collections such as Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem, Albertina Museum as well as in prominent private collections. She is the laureate of the Sandeberg Prize of the America Israel Foundation, Pundik Prize, Prize of the Ministry of Culture and The Discount Bank Prize.