Anna Levit. Destination Automatic translate
с 14 по 29 Января
Борей Арт-Центр
Литейный 58
Санкт-Петербург
The artist is not attracted by the ceremonial St. Petersburg, pompous palaces and spiers, she is not interested in the tourist center of the city - much closer and dearer is what happens a little on the outskirts. Shabby firewalls, boiler pipes, roadworks, abandoned courtyards, a cafe in St. Petersburg, a line of cars on the Obvodny Canal embankment. In general, places imbued with the spirit of the city. Places for the artist are not accidental: the Trinity Cathedral is associated with the poetry of Helena Schwartz, a friend worked in the Mariinsky Hospital, a son walked in the garden of the Fountain House.
This is an attempt to convey dampness and wind, dilapidation of houses and the proximity of water on paper. So that the viewer who came to the exhibition could immerse himself in the memories associated with this city.
Anna Levit was born in 1986 in Leningrad into a family of artists.
She studied drawing with Ekaterina Meleshkova, Alexander Daniel, Yuri Gusev.
In 2008, she graduated from the Department of Scenography and Theater Technology of the St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Arts with a degree in Stage Design.
In 2009, the first solo exhibition took place in the gallery "Tower" in St. Petersburg.
In 2015 she graduated from the Alexandrinsky Theater under the direction of Valery Fokin and Andrey Moguchiy. Specialty - theatrical art.
Since 2018 she has been a member of the Union of Artists of St. Petersburg.
His works are in private collections in Russia and abroad.
SEASON - TENDERNESS
Alla Zinevich
In the pastels of Anna Levit, every season is tenderness.
An artist who comes from a family of artists is not secondary. For the apple from the apple tree metaphysically falls in a spiral, that is, even the strongest psychogenetic heritage is corrected by the individual temperament and the uniqueness of the biography. Renaissance and classicism do not copy or even vary antiquity - they recode it.
People on the streets, including on benches, in cafes, views from the window (including a houseplant with its modest and cozy point of view) - it would seem that ordinary life. From Tatiana Zuses here is a favorite technique, pastel (mother is matter), from Aron Zinshtein - a clear sense of color, but softer in other tonalities. Because of the preference for a small form over a vast landscape, because of a more improvised material - created as if in order to stealthily, as paparazzi shoots, paint from nature? Or is the reason for the muted, hue-to-hue overflowing gamut, in contrast to the often strictly separated, as if in the village when plowing - cereals, in the picture of the same colorful fields - in a different way? But what if the viewer’s attempts to explain the artist do not “compete” because there are no conflicts in Anna Levit’s pastels,and "friends"? The choice of material and at least part of the overall approach to self-expression are interdependent.
Yes, pastel - both “for home, for the family”, and for walks - alone or with loved ones (relatives, friends), and for sketching visitors at opening days and other similar events (here she shares the top four with a simple pencil, various kinds of markers and ink pen). This material is partly sketchy, sketchy, and any work performed by him may seem at least a little unfinished - but this is not imperfection, but at the level of substance and the author’s subconscious, a demonstration of the duration, fluidity of life. An alternative to Faust’s dream of a stopped moment (in which there is a lot of the essence of art as such) is Anna Levit’s Blake’s infinity in the cup of a flower (more specifically, on empty benches, in cups forgotten on the table, in the snail traffic of a tram). This time,which does not officially exist in the Russian language and therefore in the literature created on it is a real long, procedural one: yes, those same English –ing. A way of contemplating life, forbidden to the domestic word and deliberateness, but characteristic of visual art and our country, is international, rather oriental in spirit.
But Russia lies between the West and the East, bizarrely synthesizing them, and St. Petersburg, whose landscapes and everyday sketches are offered to us by Anna Levit, is a “window to Europe”. This “intentional city” is capable of not only inhaling trends from the Baltic, but also sending gentle rays of nirvana into the Faustian culture. There is no viscous dark, Hoffmannian-Gogol or Baudelaire-twilight mysticism in these pastels, there is no tragic and hopeless romance, but there is a quiet light, almost prayerful, the ability to live simply and wisely - to see and depict "from the outskirts to the center" any landscape and every passer-by (standing, sitting) in it as it is. Without introducing excessive ideological intention, but not by artistic means alone - colors, lines, compositions, chiaroscuro. For with acceptance, with love.
Because "true tenderness cannot be confused with anything, and it is quiet."
Look at the pastels of Anna Levit and feel the peace of a simple, hardworking and resting from work in your hour, everyday earthly paradise, which everyone is able to create for himself - by changing the internal optics. And genuine art is the best means for such a washing of the soul.