Renée Levi – Rhabarber

Renée Levi (* 1960 in Istanbul, lives in Basel) is among Switzerland’s most significant artists working in paintings and installations. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally for more than 20 years, and also appears in significant public and private collections at home and abroad. In 2018, the artist was awarded the art prize of the Société des Arts de Genève, and CHF 50,000 in prize money. She studied architecture at the HTL Muttenz/Basel and fine arts at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich. Since 2001, Renée Levi has been active as a professor of painting at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel.

Since the late 1990s, Renée Levi has been calmly interrogating the medium of painting, subjecting a discipline often declared to be dead to joyful and critical reappraisals. In her spatially extensive installations, she expands the effects of colour and form to break the boundaries within the space in brilliant ways. Surprising dialogues between painting and architecture are bringing to light new and untapped energies within the medium. Renée Levi’s interventions are both radical and precise. Colour and form take on powerful dimensions in a playfully light way; in spite of their sensual force, they lose none of their fragility.

For her solo exhibition at the Museum Langmatt, Renée Levi creates a painterly dialogue between the inside and the outside space. For the first time, she presents pictures in a natural setting. The large-format pictures in the painting gallery correspond with those outside in the park. The pictures are intentionally exposed to the forces of wind and weather. Renée Levi surrenders authorship to nature, allowing it to continue the work on these pictures.

The exhibition and the accompanying publication were created in a collaboration with the Société des Arts de Genève, which is holding an exhibition of the artist’s work in the Palais de l’Athénée in Geneva in October 2019, to celebrate Renée Levi’s art prize. This publication offers a comprehensive overview of the multifaceted work created by Renée Levi over the past ten years. It also documents her new artworks in Baden and Geneva. The texts are written by Markus Stegmann, Karine Tissot and Christina Végh, German/French/English, hardcover, Verlag Hatje Cantz Berlin. Available at the end of September in our shop.

Image: Exhibition view, Renée Levi – Rhabarber, Gallery