Marianne Lévai

Exhibition Dates: May 9, 2002 — April 30, 2003

Born in Germany, Marianne Lévai spent many years in Switzerland, where her work has been shown numerous times. Nine years ago she moved to New York City. Her sculptural work was shown in the East Village at La MaMa La Galleria in June 1999. In 2001 and 2002 her pieces were included in the Small Works Exhibition at the Washington Square East Galleries. In her sculptural work Marianne Lévai assembles long tubes and abstract shapes made of fired clay with steel pipes, supports and wall attachments. Their raw surfaces only partially covered by oxides, the sculptures resemble archaic artifacts of undefined functions and are reminiscent of tools and totems, weapons and bones.

Lévai’s collages, composed of edgy scraps, explore the transparencies and textures of found papers in complex layers. In some of the pieces she includes photographs, patches of paint or handwritten text in order to add levels of reference. In her mixed media work, Lévai uses fish bones, seeds, twigs, cuts of stems, strips of bark and other natural fragments with which she reassembles miniature landscapes and relief maps of delicate beauty. Covered by translucent wax, the pieces can equally be seen as magnified vistas into a microscope or as protected repositories of rare genetic specimens.