SKZ Student Monochrome Workshop
Dan Levenson
Friday, December 2, 2011 - Friday, December 30, 2011
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Dan Levenson also evokes a fictive narrative in SKZ Student Monochrome Workshop, this time about an idealistic art collective, Little Switzerland, torn between the desire to find their own voices and the need to meet strict modernist standards. His project is about the making of art and artists—borrowing from mythical historical art schools, such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College—and using painting, objects, and ephemera to tell the group's story
ABOUT THE ARTIST
I am a Los Angeles based visual artist working in installation, performance, video, painting, and sculpture. My work takes the form of artifacts rescued from the ruins of an imaginary art school: the State Art Academy, Zürich (its initials in Swiss-German are SKZ). My paintings follow the strict formalist pedagogy of this imaginary school: metrically sized canvases are divided geometrically to create rational and reproducible abstract compositions. I expand on the story through performance, installation and video.
Each painting title is a unique name meant to represent a student in the imaginary State Art Academy, Zürich. Each name is used only once.
In 2004 I used a computer script to combine each surname from the Zürich phone book with a list of common Swiss first names in every possible unique combination. This generated a list of hundreds of millions of unique names. 135,000 of these names were mixed up randomly and printed in this book. The titles for my paintings are drawn in random order from the same list. https://danlevenson.com/About
