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, The Sheila R. Johnson Gallery at the New School, and other organizations. A MacDowell Colony Fellow, a NJSCA grant recipient and a recipient of a Pollack Krasner grant, Wendy’s work has received numerous awards. Born in Philadelphia, she received a BFA from Tyler School of Art and an MFA from Hunter College. Wendy teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York and Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. She is represented by K. Imperial in CA, NL=US in the Netherlands, Beth Urdang in Boston and Fou gallery in New York.

STATEMENT

I think of my work as spaces shaped through the sensation of dreaming—fluid, ethereal, unstable, and immersive—where feeling, memory, and imagination converge. They are less scenes from a dream, and more the sensation of dreaming itself, where images appear and dissolve as negative and positive spaces fold into one another. In both my sculptures and paintings, lines and circles, organic and inorganic shapes are used symbolically, referencing cycles of the moon, the movement of rivers and waves, and the warp and weft of the universe. Lyrical lines flow through the work to create space and guide the eye, while also embodying the ideals of the “flow state.” The dream quality is also a byproduct of each work’s evolution through subconscious thinking and spontaneity.

Since childhood, I’ve been drawn to patterns in my environment. This interconnectedness dissolves boundaries between myself and my surroundings, revealing continuities between the cosmic and the microscopic, and between interior and exterior realms. The merging of abstraction and representation in my work stems from these dualities. Surrealism, symbolism, and magical realism were early influences. Jean Arp’s sculptural work and the visionary paintings of Agnes Pelton continue to inspire me.

All of my work begins with drawing, whether in two or three dimensions. I’m as comfortable with a pencil as with digital tools where my drawings can be transformed into large laser-cut forms for sculptures and installations. Here I push rigid industrial materials into fluid, perceptual movement, translating lace-like patterning, moiré effects, and shifting light into immersive spatial experiences. Painting and sculpture form a continuum, channeling energy into visual structures that connect natural rhythms with human experience.

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