Yudith Levin: Break of Dawn

Yudith Levin's work is built on contrasts: it is fragile yet powerful, personal yet collective, broken yet whole. In her art she walks a tightrope, constructing delicately balanced pictorial and sculptural compositions poised on the verge of collapse.

Highly original works made of plywood and painted wooden slats marked Levin’s breakthrough in the late 1970s. In these sculptural installations, random objects coalesce into a floating, nearly weightless whole. The blank wall is an essential part of the work, just as in a musical composition, the intervals between the sounds are no less important than the sounds themselves. With these works Levin became a major proponent of the “Want of Matter” style, a milestone in the history of Israeli art.

Mythological and Christian motifs have inspired many of her works, including Icarus and Daedalus, Prometheus and the Eagle, and Pietà, shown in this exhibition. A unique link was thereby forged between the humble materials of Tel Aviv’s streets and the imaginative foundations of Western culture. In the mid-1980s, in New York, Levin took up painting in acrylic on canvas. Like her earlier works, her paintings fuse strong emotion with formal restraint and move between figuration and abstraction. They are executed in a precise idiom in which each line, stain, and image is carefully placed, suggesting an ascetic sensibility.

In recent years, and particularly since October 2023, Levin has created strikingly expressive works that address the volatile and at times horrifying reality in Israel. Among them are Redheads, dedicated to the Bibas boys, who were taken hostage and murdered in the Gaza Strip; Strong as Death, which depicts a Gazan man mourning his beloved; and two paintings of airplanes that refer to the recent war in Gaza and echo the artist’s personal tragedy: her brother’s death in a military plane crash in 1956.

Yudith Levin’s work remains ever vital, changing and evolving over time. The selection presented in this exhibition, culled from half a century of artistic work, reveals a multilayered artistic dialogue between reality and myth, wholeness and dissolution, matter and spirit.