From the 3rd to 12th February the Rudolf Budja Gallery is at the American International Fine Art Fair at Palm Beach. Nina Levett’s artwork is shown at the show.
The ornamental moveable wallpaper exhibited at this art fair was made in preparation for Nina Levett’s wedding, when she made several designs to be lasered as cotton tablecloths.
Later she used the laser-ornaments to create some of her moveable wallpapers.
10 Things about Nina Levett
1// Nina Levett is an invented persona. Her nails are fake, her hair is not real. She does not exist.
2// It took her many years, one personal trainer and a few beauty docs to become as beautiful as she is now.
3// At school she was an achiever.
4// She does not believe in life after death and therefore often works long hours.
5// Nina Levett believes in following the flow. She works when ideas come to her. Much of what she does is spontaneous and unplanned. Watch the video of Amy Tan talking about creativity here.
6// She is fascinated by pop culture (Madonna,…).
7// Some of her inspiration comes from the city of Vienna and in particular the Wiener Werkstätte.
8// Her favourite film is by Abel Ferrara: “Bad Lieutenant”
9// Nina Levett eats no sugar and drinks no alcohol. She works out regularly.
10// Some of her spiritual inspiration comes from Ajahn Brahm, Theravada Buddhism and Sigmund Freud.
Nascida a 1973 em Viena de Áustria, Nina Levett, designer de ornamentos, é conhecida pelos seus designs provocantes de decoração e os seus inspirantes trabalhos tal como o sofá esperma e os coloridos e irrequietos wallpapers.
Nina Levett começa o seu trabalho com uma tinta oriunda da China e desenhando em papel transparente.
Simplesmente deixa que a sua mão faça o trabalho por ela. Desprovida de pensamento. confia no seu impulso visual e sua mão segue as imagens produzidas pelo cérebro, antecipando, assim, o próximo passo do processo de desenhar. Os trabalhos acabados são obras com diversas camadas com cores harmoniosas. Seus trabalhos, frequentemente, são criados usando diversas técnicas que ela produz no estúdio, em casa. Controla todos os passos desde os primeiros rascunhos até ao trabalho final, imagem ou porcelana.
Nina Levett encontra a sua inspiração nos filmes do género ”Bad Liutenant” de Abel Ferrara. Ela diz que o seu trabalho é inspirado pelos três de cinco P’s.
POP, PUNK, PORN, PROTEST and PAIN
Wallpapers always had their ups and downs. For example in the second half of the 1700s the Remondinis – printers from Bassano del Grappa in Italy – produced wallpapers that became so popular at the time that they was used in La Fenice, Venice. Recently wallpapers have become very en vogue again. One example of wallpaper designers who have become widely appreciated nowadays are Timorous Beasties.
Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons started out in Glasgow in the 1990s concentrating their attention on hand-printed wallpapers, fabrics and blinds. They first worked for bars, restaurants and later also designed for big furnishing companies. Lately they worked for the UK Supreme Court in London, Ogilvy and Mather in Dublin, etc.
Timorous Beasties’ motifs include giant bees, huge butterflies, thorny thistles or sensual fuchsia orchids adorn some of the wallpapers; iguanas and scary looking pheasants. One of the designs that made Timorous Beasties popular was their Glasgow Toile. Wikipedia defines toile as a type of decorating pattern consisting of a usually white or off-white background on which a repeated pattern depicting a fairly complex scene, generally of a pastoral theme such as (for example) a couple having a picnic by a lake. Toiles also often consist of an arrangement of flowers. The pattern portion consists of a single color, most often black, dark red, or blue. Originally toile was made in France in late 1700 to compete with the painted and printed cotton fabrics imported from Asia.
Timorous Beasties’ toile looks similar to the old toiles, but, on close inspection, rather than pastoral or rural scenes, it features images of addicts shooting up in the Necropolis, tramps sleeping on park benches and a young lad clad in a tracksuit peeing against some bushes, while, in the background, you can spot the Glasgow University Tower, the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Church and the Armadillo building.
Nina Levett is still starting out on her first wallpaper collection. She is facing technical problems with her in-house manufacturing technique. She sees similarities between her own narrative wallpapers and the works of Timorous Beasties.
Most of the content here is inspired by an article about Timorous Beasties written by Anna Battista. Read the complete article here.
Nina Levett talks about her new wallpaper collections and the work of Timorous Beasties. Watch her video below:
This collection encapsulates much of what makes Nina’s style so challenging and bold. The work was commissioned in 2009 by Illustrative an organization that showcases fresh, innovative and new design, and Cult Work.
The purpose was to celebrate the centenary of the Italian car manufacturer, Alfa Romeo.
Nina Levett had spent a month of frantic activity and considerable financial expense to interpret the design brief. In her porcelain she creates a complex swirl of action and movement in which she juxtaposes the hard, metallic, powerfully male automobile against the softer, more sexual and provocative female figures who tangle the design. She explores the car as an extension of male power that impacts forcefully on its environment. Her work fearlessly explores the negative impact of the automobile. For example, if you look at the wallpaper she created for this project, she transposed the Alfa Romeo snake logo into a human intestine, expelling faeces. In the accompanying collection of porcelain lampshades, cups and bowls, female figures and phallic cars dissolve into one another and are absorbed into the structure of the object.
Ironically, although perhaps unsurprisingly, although Nina worked with many of the unspoken, subliminal values and images that are crucial to the success of car advertising – power, masculinity, sexual dominance and sexual prowess – the explicitness and exaggeration of Nina’s interpretation might have been too bold and unsettling for Alfa Romeo. They withdrew support for the project, leaving Nina considerably out of pocket and demoralised, but artistically invigorated by the design process itself. The project crystallised in her mind the difficulty that she faces when trying to make her frequently difficult work commercial, but the experience also resulted in the birth of a new style of art. The dense, complete coverage of a surface that she created for this project was to reappear in much of the art that followed on from it and has become a hallmark of her design technique.
