BIOGRAPHY

Wendy Letven is a multidisciplinary artist with a practice that includes painting, sculpture and installation art. Wendy has created sculptures and installations for The New York Percent for Art Program, Brookfield Properties, The Riverside Park Conservancy, Art on Paper Fair, Market Art and Design, and The Sheila R. Johnson Gallery at the New School, and other organizations. Her paintings and and sculptures are in private collections across the US, Asia and in Europe. Wendy is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, A NJSCA grant recipient and a recipient of a Pollack Krasner grant. Born in Philadelphia, she received a BFA from Tyler School of Art and an MFA from Hunter College. She teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York.

GALLERY REPRESENTATION
K.Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco
NL=US Art (pronounced “Analysis”) in New York and The Netherlands
Beth Urdang Gallery in Wellesley, Massachusetts

STATEMENT

In my practice, energy becomes form through the act of painting. With ink on paper, I work intuitively, letting gesture and movement guide the image as the medium responds in its own way. The results often grow into biomorphic forms that recall natural systems—rivers, bloodstreams, branching patterns—yet remain open to shifting meaning. Color is central to this process: its placement and intensity can transform the work’s associations, creating a range of emotional and visual effects that carry both force and resonance.

This way of working also shapes my painted aluminum sculptures and installations for public spaces. I approach it with the same attention to rhythm and movement. Through bold shapes and color, I create visual narratives that reflect the character and history of each location while retaining a sense of organic flow.

Together, these practices form a continuum. Whether on paper or in public space, my work channels energy into visual structures that connect natural rhythms with human stories.

From a Spring 2018 BROOKLYN RAIL REVIEW...

"... it's Letven who comes closest to charting a viable new path for abstraction. Light and heavy, flat and full all at once, her work uses color not just to imitate space but to play with the very idea of it, to marvelous effect.

But it was her laser-precise paper cut-outs which left me thinking hardest. By consciously juxtaposing patterns drawn from technology and nature against each other in a highly stylized manner, all while employing high-tech implements, Letven seems to be interrogating humanity’s relationship to the world from which it sprang, discovering forms which blur the distinction we tend to make between ourselves and our ecology. " –John Micheal Colon

https://brooklynrail.org/2018/03/artseen/Between-the-Color

More information about specific bodies of work can be found in each sub category on this site.

contact:  wletven@gmail.com