Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, December 8, 2022: Silvia Levenson, an Argentinian glass artist (#1720)

Thursday, December 8, 2022

Artist of the Day, December 8, 2022: Silvia Levenson, an Argentinian glass artist (#1720)

Silvia Levenson (1957) is a contemporary Argentinian artist and political activist working in glass. Originally a graphic artist in her native Argentina whose work, both artistic and political, was in direct conflict with the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla, she found herself and her young family immigrating to Italy in 1980. Glass soon became the new medium in which she could best express her feelings of exile, oppression and personal tragedy.

Silvia Levenson was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Born into a time when political and social activism was encouraged, she began protesting on behalf of the Buenos Aires poor as early as 14. By the time she was 16 she was married and before her 20th birthday she was a mother. It was during this time that the political climate in Argentina began to change with the military taking control of the government under Jorge Rafael Videla, the senior commander of the Argentine Army. Between 1976 and 1984 more than 30,000 people disappeared and were later killed, including members of Levenson's own family. At the age of 23 she fled to Italy with her husband and family. It was the tragic events of this time that ultimately influenced and continues to influence Levenson's artistic practice.

Silvia immigrated to Italy in 1981, during the "disappearances" of the Dirty War. She explores daily interpersonal relationships through installations and objects that state firmly what is usually felt or whispered.

Her work is centralized on this unspeakable space, which is oftentimes so small, located between what we can see and what we feel, and she uses glass to reveal those things that are normally hidden.

I explore daily interpersonal relationships through installations and objects that state firmly what is usually felt or whispered. My work is centralized on this unspeakable space, which is oftentimes so small, located between what we can see and what we feel. I use glass to reveal those things that are normally hidden.

I believe that there are no neutral materials; in my work I mainly use glass because I am fascinated by its ambiguity. It is a material that we all know well because it protects and isolates our homes, we use it to preserve our foods and beverages but in some ways we also know that it is fragile, that it can break into thousands of tiny pieces and hurt us. For my work it becomes the ideal material to show the ambiguity of human relationships and of the things that exist but that hide behind the thousand folds of what we call reality.

Furthermore, as Tina Olkdown noted, “women's works, such as cooking and crafts, is often sarcastically described as product of “loving hands at home” and it is considered the antithesis of male-dominated “high art”. I use a very traditional, hand-crafted material to describe not what we put on top of our furniture but what we carefully hide under our rugs. – Silvia Levenson

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