ARTIST STATEMENT

Anita Levering is interested in the elimination of artistic agency in favour of a self organizing ideographic language, going beyond the personal gestural act and expression. Experimental exercises reveal paradoxes and tensions between the structured and the organised, form and disorder. When applying paint Levering minimizes gesture and brush marks to avoid subjective intentions. The medium itself and chance elements determine the outcome in the creative process, the work becomes open to randomness and dissipation, but at the same time it allows for the creation of a universal symbolic and ideographic grammar in painting itself. These semi self generated paintings create a presence that break through the two dimensional picture plane with a illusion of a shallow virtual space.

The introduction of fate in the process, is the realization of a desire for detachment, a distancing of the self that allows focus on natural transitional processes, rather than the artist’s own propulsive force to generate form. The works become the site of traces of an experience, displaying evidence of past autonomous material events. These paintings do not ‘represent’ something but present the thing itself: a document of dialogue with uncontrolled external forces, drawing out new connections in the viewer’s experience.

The artworks reveal the impact of processes of transition generated by forces of Nature and bring about notions of time, quantity, motion, momentum and environmental circumstances such as the weather. Through unpredictable metamorphoses of the painted surface Levering is navigating the territory of intentional and unintended outcomes and the role of limited authorial control.

BIOGRAPHY

Anita Levering was born in Egmond-Binnen, the Netherlands in 1962. She graduated from School of Art in Amsterdam, where she received her BA in Fine Art education in 1987 and a BA in image&media technology from Utrecht School of Art in 1989. Anita completed her MA IMM at Royal College of Art, London in 1996 and her MFA at Elam School of Art, University of Auckland in 2010. In 1988 Anita emigrated to New Zealand and is currently living and practicing between Amsterdam and Auckland where she is represented by Sanderson Contemporary.