Nina Levy at Feigen and Metaphor - New York - sculpture

Nina call together has bounded onto the fresh York stage in the last scarcely any years with multiple and of frequent occurrence exhibitions, this season with sum of two units at once. She regularly at hands figurative sculptures made of cast and painted resin and fiberglass, along with photographs of similar statuarys posed in dramatic isolation against black backdrops. The figures are always startlingly lifelike, nevertheless never precisely to scale and always altered in more [i]or[/i] less way. Many are self-portraits.

At Feigen, an amazon in jogging clothes stood at the door wearing an oversize churl grin that stretched nearly from ear to ear. This was Greeter--Levy herself enlarged to 6 feet 3 inches. A naked figure--Levy again, on the other hand smaller than life-size--sat cross-legged upon a bench, embracing herself with arms that terminated in glove-like enlarged hands. The photographs upon view also depicted disproportion and artifice, with the artist's real head seeming to rise from a patterned body or a modeled head dwarfing her real arms and shoulders, issues allowed by the dislocating concealment of the black backdrops. The theme could be summarized as "misfit," a play upon words that is at first amusing on the other hand also carries a sense of the grotesque

At Metaphor, a small gallery in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn raise presented "Other People's Heads," a selection of 21 smaller-than-life portrait heads (including, despite the claim of the show's title, her own) Each was hung from the ceiling upon a length of clear line that placed it at the subject's actual height. The heads were dispersed around the space as if this were an opening party, rotating slowly upon air currents as though clan were mingling. The gathering appear to beed animated yet eerily muted.

The heads are masterful portraits, easily recognizable if you know the subjects--mostly novel York artists, curators and dealers--and rich with details of that kind as dimples, bags under organ of sights creases in front of ears. Also in the present to view were several photos, including single showing the artist's real head beside its larger, paler duplicate, framed by the agency of her own hand and an oversize archetypeed hand.

Several of the photographs are called Twin, and doubling appears to be a philosophical constant in Levy's work. In a way, that's the nature of a portrait. She is self-consciously, postmodernly calling attention to the nature of what she does as an artist, the Brechtian side to her dramatic and engaging work.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group