Lena Levin

This series marked an important breakthrough for me: testing how far can I go in relinquishing everything but color as a means of expression; in dissolving shapes and lines into brushstrokes and light; in switching off structure and geometry and relying completely on the power of color. Afterwards, the shapes and structures reemerged, yet at what I feel as another level of understanding. Read more

The name of this series comes from a conversation I had on Google+ in 2012. In my post, I lamented the fundamental contradiction of my life: I feel that I live in a world overwhelmed by noise and too many "things", so the best one can do is shut up and make nothing more; and yet on another level I feel as though I have things to say, and my life's work involves making new material objects, paintings. A commenter on that post, Eva Bogomolny, suggested that I should try and imagine nothingness. I responded that, if I did, I would just end up painting nothingness, and something clicked for me at that moment. When I showed one of the first paintings from this series, Eva told me that it was exactly how she, herself, saw nothingness in her mind.

Albeit in slightly different ways, all these paintings have this in common: they are all painted over older, more straightforwardly representational, ones. Where the older versions depicted various material things in different arrangements, the newer ones dissolve them into swirls of colour and light, making matter as immaterial as possible.