Arik Levy: Art

Arik Levy: Art, published as a sister volume to a forthcoming book on Levy's design, encompasses the last ten years of the Israeli born, Paris-based, practitioner's output. Artist, technician, photographer, designer and filmmaker, Levy's skills and indeed outlook are entirely multidisciplinary, whilst his work can be seen in prestigious galleries and museums worldwide. Influenced by Arte Povera, he is comparable to Anish Kapoor and Jeff Koons in sharing an exploration of advanced manufacturing processes within his work, often taking the form of highly polished metal structures. Yet Lev y is distinctly committed to an ideology of nature and natural materials despite his working with the constraints of industrial forms and manufacturing processes. Indeed he considers himself more of a "feeling" artist, this tactile association with nature fostered perhaps by his background and time spent in different corners of the globe. To that extent, perhaps his harmonious approach disseminates his interest in the difficulties of categorisation within areas of the arts, where objects, critiqued in often abstract terms, as being either 'design' or 'art' are judged differently in terms of value, both financial and critical. In part this argument is addressed in the separation of his work into two volumes, with the second, companion volume Arik Levy: Design, being published next season.