Kasmin is pleased to announce the representation of Matvey Levenstein.
Matvey Levenstein’s paintings explore themes of history and representation, speaking to the relevance of Romanticism in the 21st Century. His quiet meditations are filtered through the most traditional painterly genres—the landscape, the still life, and the portrait—and are imbued with a distinctly literary sensitivity. A sincere engagement with nature, combined with the prevalent cinematic aspects of Levenstein’s work, call to mind radical 20th-century filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman.
Levenstein’s current eponymous exhibition at Kasmin was reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker, as “fantastically skilled and sensitive [...] Levenstein’s temerity fascinates.” For The New Criterion, critic Robert Becker wrote, “There’s an all-over radiance coming from somewhere beneath the surfaces of Levenstein’s paintings, dispersing light evenly like a fine mist on a still morning. It’s an artist’s trick, and heaven knows how he mastered it.” The exhibition will close on March 2, 2019.
Matvey Levenstein was born in 1960 in Moscow, U.S.S.R., and lives and works in New York City and Orient, NY. He received his M.F.A. at Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT, after attaining a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and the Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow, U.S.S.R. He has mounted solo exhibitions at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Larissa Goldston Gallery, and Jack Tilton Gallery. Levenstein teaches at the School of Visual Art, New York, NY. He will be included in the forthcoming publication “Landscape Painting Now” by Todd Bradway.
Portrait by Diego Flores.
