BIOGRAPHY

Wendy Letven is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation and painting in the New York area. This year she received a 2023 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Currently she is working on a permanent ceiling sculpture for the lobby of PS at Schermerhorn, funded by the New York City’s Percent for Art program. Wendy has created sculptures and installations for The Riverside Park Conservancy, Brookfield Properties, Art on Paper Fair, Market Art and Design, and The Sheila R. Johnson Gallery at the New School and others. Her paintings and and sculptures are in private collections across the Us, in Asia and in Europe. Her work has been exhibited at Art Fairs including Art on Paper in NY and Amsterdam, Volta in NY, Market Art and Design in the Hamptons, and Pulse in Miami. Wendy is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a recipient of a Workspace Grant from Dieu Donne Papermill in New York. Raised in Philadelphia, she received a BFA from Tyler School of Art and an MFA from Hunter College. She teaches Art and Design at Parsons School of Design and at Montclair State University.

GALLERY REPRESENTATION

Fou Gallery in Brooklyn
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

At heart there is a sense of play and improvisation in my art practice as I insist on the sort of freedom and joy this brings both me and the viewer. In my sculptural work organic and geometric patterns, graphemes and gestures are combined suggesting a collision in abstract space. Cast shadows add a layer of ethereality to the materiality of it, where mostly planar materials including paper and sheet aluminum are folded, bended, and attached to create volumes. My paintings are similarly charged with a sense of motion; the exuberance of line, texture, color and form, and like my sculptures, a dialogue between substance and light. On or off the page, I am working through a deep impulse to draw the energy I feel and see it materialize in space. 

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