Jill Levine is a native New Yorker. She attended Queens College, where she earned her BA and also received a fellowship to the Yale Summer School of Art at Norfolk, CT. She earned her MFA from the Yale University School of Art, which included a semester at the Royal College of Art in London. She has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1970’s in both group and solo exhibitions. In 2000 she was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2005 a NYFA Fellowship. Her sculpture is included among numerous private and corporate collections worldwide as well as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Art in Embassies, Mumbai Embassy. She lives and works in New York.

Question

Recently your sculptures have become bilaterally symmetrical, more so than in the past. Because of this, their shape references faces, heads and bodies which is sometimes reinforced by the painted shapes and other times obscured by them. Will you talk about your focus on the symmetrical (or almost symmetrical)?

Answer

I build my sculptures from a selection of pre-cut Styrofoam shapes. They are tooth picked and then glued together, covered with plaster dipped gauze and coated with modeling compound. I was projecting Hindu, then Mexican images on my sculptures. My concern was how to disrupt the surface so that the image would be distorted and stretched across the forms. I created more and more complex bulbous protrusions to ensure these visual ruptures. Although the paintings on the pieces were very distinguishable I started to feel that I wanted to simplify the form.

Vuelva, 2014, 15x13x9″

The sculptures have always had a human scale, kind of a half torso size. I retired from teaching and found myself with a lot more time in my studio. Surrounded by my cats and their toys I thought that this was a good jumping off point to move the forms in a different direction. My work has always had a playful side and the idea of symmetry pushed me towards sculptures that were more of a hybrid between the animal/human worlds. In the Rockefeller Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art there are several examples of shamanistic figures with minimal form, very powerful, some painted, some made from weird materials. I have always been attracted to these.

Asi, 2015, 18x14x7″

As a compliment to the symmetry I used the serapes I have around my house as an inspiration on how to paint them. Bands of horizontal color coupled with an overlay of Codex images and antique Mexican cylinder seal patterns wrapped around the pieces with some distortion. At the same time I started a doing a lot of gouache drawings. The drawings moved the painting on the sculpture in a different direction.  I wanted to use color to expand the sculptural forms.

Claro, 2015, 24x16x6″

I think I am always reacting to myself when I work. Over the years my sculptures resembled toys, tools, or molecular structures, growing more complicated. It seems only natural that now the work is simpler and symmetrical of sorts, a kind of cycle.