BAD HOMBURG.- Galerie Scheffel is presenting MineralForest, an exhibition of works by Israeli artist Arik Levy, who lives and works in France. Levy has brought together some 60 of his unmistakable sculptures, paintings and drawings to create a powerful overall installation in Bad Homburg, Germany. The exhibition in the Jakobshallen is open from 17 July until 2 October 2021.

Arik Levy’s sculptural works are distinguished by their carefully modulated artistic form. Precise in their proportions and structural balance, they are inspired by transitions between emotion, science, nature, society and the notion of time. Levy has created a distinct formal alphabet, which he continues to develop and expand. At the same time, his artistic creations are never a sheer formal experiment. Rather, the quality of his works rests, on the one hand, on abstract and personal sculptural answers to questions concerning the role of memory in processes of pictorial visualization, human conceptions of the real and our individual assertiveness in the world – and on the other, on the essence of the sculptural in relation to spatial and temporal experience.

Levy’s works call up metaphors of natural growth structures, yet they are made of Corten steel, mirror-polished marine grade stainless steel, painted or powder-coated stainless steel, bronze, wood or glass. His “Rocks” – whether individually or assembled in “RockFormations”, fused together in “RockFusions”, or piled one on top of the other in various degrees of balanced equilibrium as “RockTowers” – offer the observer walking around them an inexhaustible series of single views. At the same time, the play of light and shadow on their surfaces reinforces the impression of movement and transformation. This impression is intensified further in Levy’s wholly or partly mirror-polished works in special high-grade stainless steel: here – depending on the observer’s movement – the surroundings seem to merge into the works, reflected and recomposed in ever-changing detailed views and pictorial compositions.




In his “RockQuakes” series, whose bronze “Rocks” seem to burst open through the forces released in their core, like a seed germinating – or his “RockGrowth” works, whose linear elements seem to be an accelerated growth into space – Arik Levy expresses a powerful internal dynamic. And works such as his “Craters”, with their varied circumscriptions of space, equally express the artistically mature sculptural language of Arik Levy.

“In my work, vertical and horizontal provide an understanding of gravity and direction. Balance refers to self-control, direction refers to emotional orientation, order refers to control, reflection to imagination and space”, explains the artist.

Arik Levy, born in 1963 in Tel Aviv, is internationally known for his unmistakable sculptures and installations. His works can be seen in public spaces around the world, as well as in prestigious collections of contemporary art – from the Baker Museum of Art in Naples, Florida, to the Bisazza Foundation in Montecchio Maggiore, Italy, the Jewish Museum in Paris or the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. His most monumental sculpture to date, standing 20 x 20 x 20 metres high, will be installed in front of the future Hermitage Modern Contemporary Museum in Moscow.

In Germany, Levy has also exhibited his work. In 2019, in the twelfth Blickachsen exhibition, several of his abstract “Rock” pieces were on display in Frankfurt and Kronberg, while in the Bad Homburg Kurpark his “Giant Log”, reaching 13 metres into the sky, attracted visitors from afar.

Now, Arik Levy is showing a representative selection of his works in a solo exhibition in the Galerie Scheffel Jakobshallen in Bad Homburg. The site’s spatial dimensions inspired him with the idea of a forest, where the vegetable becomes mineral, and the mineral is of a different nature. Thus some 60 of Arik Levy’s works condense, in the exhibition halls created from the former St. James’ church and its adjoining garden, into a “MineralForest”: sculptures in a variety of forms and materials, as well as works on paper, are organized as solitary elements of physical nature held together by the power of our imagination and thoughts.

“Arik Levy convincingly and appealingly stages his striking vocabulary of sculptural forms, modified and developed in diverse work series, in the spaces of the Jakobshallen. We enter complex moments of perception, and our visual experiences and ideas about them reflect the significance of Levy’s art. It enables us to discover the new, and enriches us”, says Achim Sommer, director of the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, in his speech at the opening of the exhibition at the Jakobshallen, in the presence of the artist.