Continuing through August 30, 2025
Traditional sculptural media tends to be of the heavy, bulky type, attracting artists invested in mass and monumentality. Others opt for a lighter touch, favoring materials perhaps gleaned more from the waste stream than the art supply store. Marilyn Levin is one of the latter. Levin’s current exhibition offers wall-mounted, painted, cardboard constructions as well as one large free-standing sculptural piece and a sculptural maquette. All together, these objects transcend their humble origins.
Levin studied fine art on both coasts. Burdened by the weight of tradition found in Boston, where she spent her undergraduate years, she sought out Richard Diebenkorn at UCLA for grad school, and absorbed his obsession with light, space, and color. It was in the late 70s that Levin first adopted cardboard as a medium of choice. As a painter, she had begun to find working on stretched canvas to be restrictive. Cardboard, so ubiquitous, offered her an opportunity to create large-scale works that were light and flexible, while also implying an environmentally sensitive stance that remains timely. As she was on sabbatical in California, a more practical motivation was that the works could be folded up and shipped more easily, although that option ultimately appeared too risky. She also discovered that she loved its sculptural possibilities.
The largest work in her current show is “Unpacked Orange,” (1986-2024), which immediately demands your attention. Here, Levin reworks one of her few extant earlier painted cardboard works. Mounted a bit low on the far wall, the work spans about ten feet and hangs with the top edge around eye-level. Four large rectangular panels present blocks of color, some earth tones, others fields of glowing orange and a complementary blue. A large flap extends forward from the lower edge, hovering above the floor at an improbable angle that creates a beguiling illusion of floating. While clearly made of ordinary cardboard, this work has a weight and a presence suggestive of other media, such as distressed metal. The material reveals its history through marks and scuffs, mysterious scrawled numbers and letters, drips, holes, and bent corners. Through Levin’s process and sheer force of will, castoffs become consequential.
After a lengthy return to working on canvas, Levin was drawn back to cardboard during COVID, a time of abundant shipping material. She now paints with acrylics rather than oils. “Unpacked Layered” (2021) juxtaposes subtle hues, such as a hybrid
color between pink and brown, an effect of the cardboard filtered through a thin scrim of mauve paint. At the top, a layer of paper curls forward away from the cardboard to reveal the corrugations beneath. The layered panels display their battered edges, here and there accentuated with paint — orange, blue, or raw umber. These scruffy elements mesh to unexpectedly produce a work of astonishing delicacy.
Levin has long been fascinated by India, where she has traveled and held artist’s residencies. She has expressed a deep connection to the spiritual aspects of Indian art and culture. Her painterly palette, with its contemplative blues and scorching pinks, as well as her use of metallic paint, relates to Indian art, clothing, and roadside shrines. Levin’s color sensibility also re-emerges at times in the more sculptural work, such as in “Unpacked Pearly Pink” (2024), a little gem. The cigar-box shaped piece opens frontally to reveal an interior where metallic silver abuts pink-violet on the right edge, as a large hot pink blob spills off the bottom of the work. Levin’s technique often involves pouring paint, as is evident here. A cool blue-violet patch contains granular encrustations, as does the silver patch on the right. Below, a dramatic shadow, cast by the work and its supporting shelf, lends this small work a presence greater than its size.
A large sculpture, “Tipping Point” (2025), leans in the front corner of the gallery. Here, the cardboard components are stacked and wrapped, splashed with bright colors and glints of metallic paint, into a counterfeit column. The honeycomb-textured packing material at the top suggests instability, while the exposed cardboard on the lower portion reveals a “fragile” emblem, all alluding to the unstable situation in Washington, D.C. and its aftershocks radiating far beyond.
Levin continues to push and develop her work. She envisions bringing a kinetic element into play in the near future, animating her sculptures with moving beams of light to create flickering shadows. Not one to be tied down to a particular method or material, Levin’s work expresses joy in the process of creation and equally in the act of seeing, all infused with her contemplative, spiritual nature.
