Preview: Talia Levitt's “My Moon” at ATM Gallery

Talia Levitt, My Moon, installation view. Courtesy of ATM Gallery.

Talia Levitt: My Moon

ATM Gallery

March 25 through April 25, 2021

By WM, April 2021

From the press release: 

ATM Gallery NYC is pleased to present My Moon, a solo exhibition of new work by Talia Levitt, curated by Ché Moreales. On view at 54 Henry Street from March 25 through April 25, 2021. This will be Levitt’s first solo exhibition at ATM.  

In this exhibition Levitt transforms canvases into distressed, patterned tapestries decorated with tenderly rendered suggestive objects. These diaristic trompe l’oeil still lives openly relate to menstruation and birth control, evoking the paradoxically gender inclusive history of still-life in European academic painting due to the genre’s anti-intellectual stance. 

While these paintings rarely depict the artist herself, they often operate as self portraits of anatomy, and exude an encrypted sense of humor. Many of these paintings contain belt trims, to equate the still lives with reproductive organs.  

Talia Levitt, My Moon, installation view. Courtesy of ATM Gallery.

Levitt and Morales have transformed the cold gray tile of the gallery’s front room into a warm pink carpet that pays homage to the artist’s childhood bedroom; the place where she experienced her first period. The carpet provides a felt, sensory experience mimicking the textures found in the work itself. 

As you enter the back room of the gallery, the space takes a turn from domestic and bodily to the studio, the site of process. Here, her paintings are installed amongst ‘scraps of paper’ that Levitt convincingly cast out of paint, and hung with facsimile tape. These generous details share a glimpse of the materials from which the work was referenced. 

Talia Levitt, Deep V, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of ATM Gallery.

Materially, Levitt plays with trompe l’oeil by using the properties and potential of acrylic paint to both describe and become the objects that she is mimicking. She uses a variety of inventive procedures to manipulate the paint to become textures such as crochet, glass, screen, jewels and fabric. 

In My Moon, Levitt and Morales create a personal space that gives the viewer more insight, not only into Levitt’s personal life but her practice behind the work as well. WM