Levi van Veluw | The Monolith

LEVI VAN VELUW | THE MONOLITH
September 10 – October 29, 2016

Press release | 25 August 2016

Galerie Ron Mandos is pleased to present The Monolith, an exhibition of new works by Levi van Veluw, that explore the significance of reality through a perfect cube in the middle of a space. Behind its dark walls, like a creator, the inventor, the artist, the maker builds a new universe where he discovers the relationship between chaos and order, disorder and alienation. Van Veluw’s layered multi-disciplinary works of sublime design, modernist architecture and disruptive environments possess a strange, unreal beauty with no perception of time, space and reality. Many of his works feature a combination of grids and geometrical shapes, which explore the idea of a deep immeasurable space. His distinctive charcoal drawings are always the starting-point. Followed by photographs being replicated life-size in wood and then become the setting for a video. The Monolith is an extension of the comprehensive exhibition The Relativity of Matter and is on show from 10 September until 29 October 2016.

Van Veluw creates powerful and accessible installations in which he combines specific surroundings with a frisson of tension. His photos are records of reality that generate room for stories and assertions while they suspense the area of a scenario inside the artist’s world. The exhibition is entirely excluded from daylight and the oppressive atmosphere is intensified by spatial interventions and interaction between installations, sculptures, photographs and drawings. By creating an environment in which everything must be redefined, the visitor becomes both hyper-aware of his surroundings as well as invited to become part of the installation. Particularly this psychological part of the process is what van Veluw interests the most.

Since his graduation in 2007, Levi van Veluw has produced multi-disciplinary works. For his all-encompassing projects Van Veluw goes through different artistic stages that eventually lead him towards the making of real size accessible installations. Since his early childhood van Veluw has been interested by settings that are theoretically possible but difficult to imagine. The fantasy about an environment with other laws of nature, a world with a different logic from ours occupies him. 10 years ago, he became fascinated with the science fiction books by Fred Hoyle, Isaac Asimov and Aldous Huxley. In his work, van Veluw often refers to the underlying principles of these stories in which science, technology and the development of knowledge are called into question. For his all-encompassing projects Van Veluw goes through different artistic stages.

Van Veluw’s varied body of work has been showcased in many different locations across Europe and the United States, earning him a number of nominations and awards. His works were a.o. shown at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City, Design Museum, London, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in the Denver Theatre District, at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona and in the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis.

The exhibition opens on Saturday 10 September 2016 in presence of the artist.