Dan Levenson & Nick Aguayo: A to L and Back Again
Oolong Gallery is proud to present the first duo exhibition A to L and Back Again between Dan Levenson and Nick Aguayo, two Los Angeles-based painters and close friends working with geometric abstraction, whose practices explore authorship and the constructed nature of art-making鈥攂oth conceptually and materially.
Dan Levenson鈥檚 art practice operates as a conceptual mirror, reflecting and refracting the frameworks that underpin the production of art itself. Levenson fabricates a fictional world: The State Art Academy, Z眉rich (SKZ), a modernist art school supposedly shuttered in 1999. His paintings鈥攕igned by invented students with convincingly Swiss names鈥攎imic a fading aesthetic language reminiscent of mid-century formalism. Cracked, weathered, and stripped of narrative cues, these works are not merely paintings, but 鈥渟tudent assignments鈥� from a bygone pedagogical system. By employing standardized formats, archival references, and institutional trappings like lockers and shipping crates, Levenson critiques the myth of the lone artistic genius, instead pointing to the structures鈥攕chools, markets, national identity鈥攖hat shape and define creativity.
What appears as austere modernist painting is, in Levenson鈥檚 hands, a seductive theatrical prop鈥攁 playful performance of authorship, a sleight of hand. Through this ongoing conceptual framework, the artist raises urgent questions: What constitutes artistic identity? How are artists produced, not just creatively, but institutionally?
Recommended for you
Oolong Gallery is proud to present the first duo exhibition A to L and Back Again between Dan Levenson and Nick Aguayo, two Los Angeles-based painters and close friends working with geometric abstraction, whose practices explore authorship and the constructed nature of art-making鈥攂oth conceptually and materially.
Dan Levenson鈥檚 art practice operates as a conceptual mirror, reflecting and refracting the frameworks that underpin the production of art itself. Levenson fabricates a fictional world: The State Art Academy, Z眉rich (SKZ), a modernist art school supposedly shuttered in 1999. His paintings鈥攕igned by invented students with convincingly Swiss names鈥攎imic a fading aesthetic language reminiscent of mid-century formalism. Cracked, weathered, and stripped of narrative cues, these works are not merely paintings, but 鈥渟tudent assignments鈥� from a bygone pedagogical system. By employing standardized formats, archival references, and institutional trappings like lockers and shipping crates, Levenson critiques the myth of the lone artistic genius, instead pointing to the structures鈥攕chools, markets, national identity鈥攖hat shape and define creativity.
What appears as austere modernist painting is, in Levenson鈥檚 hands, a seductive theatrical prop鈥攁 playful performance of authorship, a sleight of hand. Through this ongoing conceptual framework, the artist raises urgent questions: What constitutes artistic identity? How are artists produced, not just creatively, but institutionally?
Artists on show
