Marion Lerner-Levine: True Objects

Marion Lerner-Levine will exhibit a group of recent still-life oil paintings and, watercolors, and prints and drawings of both still-life and landscape. “Aquamarine”, a large oil painting was inspired by a visit to Hearst Castle, on the California coast.  The artist, impressed by two shimmering swimming pools, one lit by antique lampposts, the other, outside, surrounded by Classical columns and reflecting the blue sky and the sun. transformed the view into a still-life painting, using photos of the pools as objects on a peacock-patterned cloth. The color blue, in aquamarine, ultramarine and cobalt pigments, predominates.

Poet Anselm Hollo wrote, in The Shelves of Paradise: a note on some paintings of Marion Lerner-Levine (1979), “her paintings demonstrate a “confidence in objects and a calm, contemplative delight in them. In their ordering, arrangement, and reflection onto a painted surface they make us look at true objects - things, as opposed to commodities--anew.” In this essay, he quoted Max Beckmann, “He (William Blake) waved friendly greetings to me like a superterrestial patriarch. ‘Have confidence in objects’, he said, ‘do not let yourself be intimidated by the horrors of the world. Everything is ordered and correct and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection.’

Lerner-Levine likes a quote from Henri Matisse: “It is nothing to copy the objects which compose a still life. What matters is to express the sensation with which it inspired you, the emotion aroused by the whole thing, the relationship between the objects represented, the specific character of each of them, modified by relationship with the others, the whole intertwined like a rope or like a serpent.”

The London-born artist studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Paul Wieghardt, Vera Berdich, Laura Van Pappelandam and Adrian Troy.  Her work has been shown in numerous venues, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Academy, Katharina Rich Perlow, Gil Einstein,  NYU Grey art Gallery, the Foundry Gallery, Washington, DC, and William and Mary College. She is the recipient of awards from the Natioal Endowment for the Arts, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Yaddo Foundation residencies,  and the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Her paintings and prints are in numerous public, corporate and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Bellevue Hospital Center, NYC, Bank of America and Citibank collections, United States State Department, Queensboro Community College Museum,  Sprint World Headquarters, and the  Bates College Art Museum, Lewiston, ME.

M. Lerner-Levine is one of the artists featured in 100 New York Painters by Cynthia Maris Dantzic, Schiffer publications, NJ, 2007. Prince Street Gallery will host a book-signing reception, with the author on Saturday afternoon, April 19. 

For further information: phone or fax (646) 230-0246 or (718) 965-3136