Announcing Representation of Matvey Levenstein

Kasmin is pleased to announce the representation of Matvey Levenstein.

Matvey Levenstein’s paintings explore themes of history and representation, speaking to the relevance of Romanticism in the 21st Century. His quiet meditations are filtered through the most traditional painterly genres—the landscape, the still life, and the portrait—and are imbued with a distinctly literary sensitivity. A sincere engagement with nature, combined with the prevalent cinematic aspects of Levenstein’s work, call to mind radical 20th-century filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman.

Levenstein’s current eponymous exhibition at Kasmin was reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker, as “fantastically skilled and sensitive [...] Levenstein’s temerity fascinates.” For The New Criterion, critic Robert Becker wrote, “There’s an all-over radiance coming from somewhere beneath the surfaces of Levenstein’s paintings, dispersing light evenly like a fine mist on a still morning. It’s an artist’s trick, and heaven knows how he mastered it.” The exhibition will close on March 2, 2019.

Matvey Levenstein was born in 1960 in Moscow, U.S.S.R., and lives and works in New York City and Orient, NY. He received his M.F.A. at Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT, after attaining a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and the Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow, U.S.S.R. He has mounted solo exhibitions at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Larissa Goldston Gallery, and Jack Tilton Gallery. Levenstein teaches at the School of Visual Art, New York, NY. He will be included in the forthcoming publication “Landscape Painting Now” by Todd Bradway.

Levenstein was born in 1960 in Moscow, U.S.S.R. and lives and works in New York City. He received his M.F.A. at Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT, after attaining a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and the Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow, U.S.S.R. He is included in the recent publications Landscape Painting Now by Todd Bradway and (Nothing but) Flowers published by Karma with essays by Hilton Als, Helen Molesworth and David Rimanelli. In 2023, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation named Levenstein a recipient of its prestigious 2022 Biennial Grant. Established in 1918, the Foundation inaugurated its biennial competition in 1980 and remains one of the largest single sources of grants for artists working in the United States today. A full-color catalogue documenting the work of grant recipients will be published in Spring 2023.

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