Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present a new installation for The Box by young US artist Dean Levin from 12 October to 14 November 2015. This will be Levin’s first solo project in London following his recent one-person exhibition with Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York earlier this year.
Having studied architecture at the Pratt Institute, Levin brings this architectural approach, as well as some of the field’s conceptual problems, to his work. Levin frequently uses reflective surfaces and materials in order to explore the dialectic between the viewer and their environment.
Questioning how we interact with shape and form, the artist disrupts modes of visual perception through subtle configurations of his work’s surfaces. This is particularly evident in Surface Support (Red and White) (2015), exhibited in the viewing room, where a red grid is used to obscure the profile of two mirrored panels.
For The Box, Levin has advanced this idea further by producing a marble basin in which water, mixed with oil pigment and graphite, will circulate. The motor activating this effect will create a dimple and shimmer in the opaque surface, distorting the viewer's reflection when he or she peers into it. The dark, navy liquid will contrast with the cold, hard organicism of the white marble basin, referencing the mixture of technology and natural materials that characterises Modernist architecture, especially that of Mies van de Rohe, who is a regular touchstone for Levin.
Dean Levin was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1988. He studied Architecture at the Pratt Institute, New York, receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in 2012. Levin has exhibited throughout the US and abroad since 2012, with solo shows at Retrospective Gallery, Hudson (2014); Bill Brady Gallery, Kansas City (2015) and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2015). The artist lives and works in New York.