Gili Levy

Visual Arts

Gili Levy

Gili Levy was born in 1982 in Herzliya, Israel. Beginning at age 12, she studied with the sculptor and painter Zvi Lachman, who was in turn a student of Leland Bell and Paul Resika at the New York Studio School. Levy went on to receive her MFA in 2008 from the New York Studio School in 2008, where she studied with Graham Nickson and Carole Robb. Levy has had a studio in Brooklyn since 2008, and her work has been presented in group exhibitions at Valentine, Centotto, Ethan Pettit, Proto Gallery and Outlet.
The exhibition includes paintings from 2014 and 2015, mostly using gouache on canvas. Her paintings before 2012 were large in scale, dark, and more tied to an Abstract Expressionist painterly language. In 2012, she took a break from this existentialist-based process to work on small watercolors. Gradually she returned to large scale paintings, bringing to them many of the qualities she appreciated in the watercolor medium.
Her paintings are made flat on the floor, and she uses a combination of brushes, knives, and sponges to apply gouache. Even so, her surfaces are built up through layers of gesso reapplication. Over the last few years, Levy’s paintings have become more urgent content-wise, depicting not just a figure, but a specific presence, narrative or mood. Her palette includes colors we commonly code as “sweet” – like pinks and purples – yet they radiate power and energetic contrast; they do not feel sweet in gesture or context.
Levy’s paintings utilize diverse painterly techniques and a range of forms—both highly legible and more abstract—as a way of finding containment for a spectrum of diverse moods and sentiments. She considers music an inspiration, in that it is considered a more acceptable medium than painting, for conveying sentiment.