| Marilyn Levine | ||
| Birth Date: December 22,1935 |
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| Death Date: April 2, 2005 Artist Gallery |
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| Marilyn Levine was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada in 1935 and immigrated to the United States in 1973. She has a MA in Chemistry from the University of Alberta and she received an MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Berkeley. In the early 60s, due to the nepotism rule Marilyn was denied employment where her husband was a teacher. So she began taking lessons in art and after one ceramic course she became thoroughly involved in clay. During a visit to California she met Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Jerry Rothman, Jim Melchert and Ron Nagle. With this great influence in mind, she moved to California where she converted a warehouse space into a studio and living quarters.
Levine makes sculptural objects giving clay the appearance of leather – a trompe l’oeil. Her work is a reversal of Claes Oldenburg’s esthetics. Oldenburg uses soft materials to represent hard objects. Levine uses clay, fired to a hardness to represent a soft material like leather. Levine said: "Leather is nice, because more than any other material, it forms a record of its own history. It develops permanent wrinkles, it takes on the shape of the wearer, it records areas of abrasion and it records areas of soil. It therefore becomes an expression of time. My work neither ignores human subject matter nor deals with it directly. Rather there is an implication of human absence which I like better,: |
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