Every month, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine chooses one of our favourite creatives to TAKE OVER our social media for the day. In May 2019 we chose Rebecca Leveille to share with us the artists who have inspired her throughout her artistic career. Just in case you missed it, below we present the full TAKE OVER.
Rebecca Leveille// Rebecca Leveille is a contemporary artist who works in a figurative mode. Freely mining both art historical sources and contemporary painting, she cites influences ranging from Titian to Walter Robinson, Fragonard to Kara Walker. Her practice translates pictorial practices and inner mythologies through her distinctive ability to compose lyrically gestured figures, largely from imagination.
Leveille maintains a relationship with language yet subverts the narrative potentials of her work in her personal determination to create something poetic rather than literal. Her exploration of the poetic versus the literal delves themes including sensuality, the female gaze, media imagery and social phenomena of the art world.
A constant subtext of Leveille’s art is her relationship to materials. Thick, buttery paint forms the confident wide lines in her oils. Washes drift below impastos. Pencil and graphite powder bear force of mark and streak. The assertion of materials never overwhelms the creation of Leveille’s pictures yet facilitates an ever-present and voluptuous tactility with meanings of its own.
Leveille’s art has garnered words of praise from Jerry Saltz, Walter Robinson and Peter Frank. Her work has been exhibited around the country, most notably at the 2017 LBIF Annual Drawing Exhibition, juried by the Whitney Museum’s Jane Panetta; the Allentown Museum of Art, PA; Delaware Art Museum, DE; and the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM. Her work has also been featured in several group shows curated by Indira Cesarine at The Untitled Space including “One Year of Resistance,” “Secret Garden: The Female Gaze on Erotica”, “She Inspires”, and “(Hotel XX)” at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018.
Her Solo show, The End of Love, up now at Untitled Space in NYC has been featured in NY Magazine’s Bedford + Bowery and was a top 9 editors pic on ArtNet.
Inka Essenhigh// I fell in love instantly and hard with Inka Essenhigh’s work when I saw it back in the early 2000’s. And like some art we fall in love with in which the infatuation for the work fades over time, I never cool in my deep admiration for what she does and has to say as an artist.
Inkas work develops internal magic-scapes that refer to the outside world while creating their own mythic language. In her paintings (often strikingly large works frequently done in oil enamel) she manifests a potent “reality” not rooted in a secondary mythology, tale, history, but rather points to the essential source of the creation of myth itself.
As with all paintings – seeing the work in person is the fullest experience of the piece and if you are in NYC she has an outstanding show up right now at Miles McEnery Gallery. If you live in the Virginia area, a retrospective of her work is up until Aug. 19th at Virginia Moca.
Robin F Williams // This striking artists came onto my radar this year with her 2017 show Your Good Taste is Showing at PPOW. Her Epic awareness of the representation of women in current culture speaks to the things I think are most important in the discussion right now
Roberta Smith of the NY Times says of William’s work:
“The paintings are extravagantly in-your-face regarding execution, style, image and social thrust. They take aim at the impossible idealizations of women in both art and advertising, depicting mostly nude and aloof androgynous supermodels, and the occasional feline, with a new kind of cool yet visceral bravura.”
Jenny Morgan// I love Jenny Morgans work. It has a duality in how it connects with you as a viewer- the directness of the gaze of the subjects, with the darkness of the emotional moments- all within a vivid and brilliant palette.
You are drawn into the work and once there you stay and continue to engage and ask questions. Her technical ability as an artist is tremendous- but how she wields that ability, how she hold it and uses it, is only as a means to give you the powerful moment in the work she wants to convey an artist.
Jamie Adams// Sheesh Jamie Adams- freaking great. That is all.
Jamie has a solo show opening soon with Jonathan LeVine Projects.
Natalie Frank// My first introduction to Natalie’s work was her 2015 show The Brothers Grimm, at the Drawing Center in NYC. Her potent, sexual, discordant, often deliberately chaotic interpretation of the classic fairy tales left me with a range of unexpected emotions, from delight to anger, from whimsy to a complex feeling of darkness and sadness. For me Franks work resonates because of this fine line she brings in this regard- these undercurrents of complex emotions in the midst of the idea of fairy tale romance.
Frank’s solo show “The Story of O” will open at Half Gallery in NYC on May 16th.
Bo Bartlett// Bartlett is at conveying an iconic and nuanced moment within an everyday scene yet deliberately stops short of telling you the whole story. The works give but also leave many questions that allow one, as the viewer, to remain within the work.
His skill is stunning but, masterfully, he always uses only as much as is needed to convey his end goals as an artist.
Maryam Gohar// Within my group of artists today I wanted to shine some light on a very new emerging artist. Maryam is an Iranian artist who works under a pseudonym to allow her anonymity as she resides in Iran and the nature of her work puts her at risk without this protection.
She deals with very complex ideas of sexuality, love and repression.
The work at times deceptively beautiful resonates with deep conflict, and undercurrents of desire unfulfilled.
This was the last piece chosen by Rebecca for her TAKEOVER. Thank you again Rebecca, we really appreciate you taking the time to put this day together.
