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Wendy Letven
Wendy Letven explores a personal language of abstraction through different art mediums, with a focus on her interest in exploring and interpreting natural form, pattern, repetition and rhythm through her reductive creative process.
Letven’s installation and sculpture works blend forms and images that transform and redefine space and atmosphere in new ways. She develops her own vocabulary of evocative symbols to construct the syntax of a universal visual language. Her suspended installations and sculptures are dynamic ensembles of light, shadow, motion, and reflection as they are constantly activated by atmospheric factors such as air flow and shifting light.
Wendy Letven, Gyre, 2020, Cut Paper, Dimensions Variable, 6 components.
Wendy Letven, In the Balance, 2018, Cut Paper, 37 x 27 inches
Wendy Letven, Perpetual Change, 2017, Collage with Cut Paper, 32 x 32 inches
The patterns, shapes and shadows interact with one another, resonating within the space as an embodied material presence. Suspended in space, they generate motion, interaction and interference that form the dynamic substance of this artwork.
Wendy Letven, Counterpoint, 2020, Painted Aluminum, Steel with wood base, 33 x 33 x 4 inches
Wendy Letven, Winding River, 2020, Painted Aluminum, Dimensions Variable
An Abstract Landscape
A statement from ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu could precisely express the poetry of this abstract landscape, “Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” Visitors are invited to perceive between physical and illusionary distortions of the changing surroundings through space and time.
Wendy Letven, Spiral and Spark, 2020, Painted Aluminum, 22 x 16 x 6 inches
Wendy Letven, Beyond the Frame, 2020, Painted Aluminum, 24 x 20 x 4 inches
Wendy Letven, Three Frequencies, 2020, Painted Aluminum, 13 x 16 x 3 inches
Wendy Letven, Scope, 2020, Painted Aluminum, 20 x 14 x 6 inches
Wendy Letven, Star Finder, 2020, Painted Aluminum, 13 x 13 x 3 inches
Wendy Letven, Spyro, 2020, Painted Aluminum, 27 x 23 x 6 inches
Letven is interested in finding ways of upending traditional art practices by integrating mark-making, painting and drawing, that clearly show the hand of the artist, with high-tech processes, such as laser-cutting, which is more mechanical in nature. In doing so, her practice is congruent with her subject matter. It is a search for universal truths that govern all disparate things which she has observed to similarly form, grow and dissipate in time. Her installation works are time-based, with no beginning or end, being reconfigured and developed every time when they adapt to a different context.
Wendy Letven, Double Ripple, 2019, Powder-coated Aluminum, 34 x 30 inches
Wendy Letven, Root Moon, 2019, Powder-coated Aluminum, 29 x 28 inches
Wendy Letven’s oil paintings experiment through flatness and space in a similar manner as her installations and sculptures. The compositions always imply portions of a larger infinite structure, constantly practicing the relationship of the parts to the whole.
The application of layered, vibrating lines create different spatial relationships within their surfaces as they rise and fall away. The lines synchronize in areas, and then appear and disappear from one to another space. The logic and mechanism of the painted forms suggest abstract landscapes within states of synchronicity, resonance, and transformative flux.
Wendy Letven, In the Current, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 36 inches
Wendy Letven, Ebb and Flow, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 36 inches
Letven’s ink painting series started in 2010.
Her worries about environmental changes, such as rising sea levels and super storms, have inspired her to imagine doomsday scenarios. Abstract expressions of subverted landscapes and rivers in the sky are always depicted in her ink series.
Wendy Letven, Flare up, 2017, Ink on Arches Paper, 30 x 22 inches
Wendy Letven, Mahogany Rift, 2020, Ink on Arches Paper, 30 x 22 inches
Wendy Letven, Subterranean Greens, 2020, Ink on Arches Paper, 30 x 22 inches
Wendy Letven, Big Pour, 2020, Ink on Arches Paper, 30 x 22 inches
With the images of abstract flows winding between positive and negative spaces, the dark implies the mysteriousness and unknowable aspects of nature, while the light implies emptiness and vastness. This idea is specifically tangible in the transparency of ink paintings where the paper surface is literally revealed.
Wendy Letven, Reframing the Moon, 2020, Ink on Arches Paper, 12 x 9 inches
Wendy Letven, Coming into Alignment, 2020, Ink on Arches Paper, 12 x 9 inches
Wendy Letven, Sky Fall, 2020, Ink on Arches Paper, 12 x 9 inches
Wendy Letven, Flame, 2020, Painted aluminum with maple base, 18 x 8 x 5 inches
Wendy Letven, Wave, 2020, Painted aluminum with walnut, 14 x 12 x 12 inches
Earth Dance, 2017, Painted aluminum with walnut, 14 x 10 x 6 inches
Wendy Letven, Winged Herald, 2020, Painted Aluminum, 6 x 12 x 3 inches
By juxtaposing, separating or regrouping her own visual vocabularies, Letven creates an inbetween state of two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums, and seeks for profound connections and resonance between phenomena.
Wendy Letven, Orca, 2020, Painted Aluminum, 10.5 x 8 x 9 inches
Fascinated with pattern and spatial relationships for years, Letven always grows her works by combining unrelated lines, shapes and symbols to pursue a deeper level of harmony from seemingly disparate visual entities. She believes in the importance of abstract connections between phenomena, and builds up an aesthetic synaesthesia shared among these different disciplines.
Wendy Letven with installation Random Misfirings of the Brain, Activate Market Street storefront installation, Newark, 2016. Photograph by Gary Fredriksen ©Wendy Letven, courtesy Fou Gallery.
Wendy Letven
b.1962, Philadelphia, U.S.
Wendy Letven is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation and painting in the New York area. Raised in Philadelphia, she received a B.F.A. from Tyler School of Art and an M.F.A. from Hunter College. She currently teaches Art and Design at New York University and at Parsons School of Design. She has created installations for Urban Outfitter Headquarter (Philadelphia, 2020), PULSE Art Fair (Miami, 2019), Portal: Governors Island Art Fair (New York, 2019), Art on Paper Fair (New York, 2019), Market Art + Design (Bridgehampton, New York, 2019), Flatiron Prow Artspace (New York, 2018), and The Sheila R. Johnson Gallery at the New School (New York, 2018) among others. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a recipient of a Workspace Grant from Dieu Donne Papermill in New York.