Jennifer W. Lacombe: CH Bookshelf

Arik Levy: Art , published as a sister volume to a forthcoming book on Arik Levy‘s design offers an engaging look at the last ten years of ‘art focused’ work by the Paris-based Israeli multidisciplinarian and worldwide creative.

Encompassing the last ten years of the Israeli born, Paris-based, practitioner’s output, the book also captures Levy’s multidisciplinary passions as an artist, technician, photographer, designer and filmmaker.

Influenced by Arte Povera, he is comparable to Anish Kapoor and Jeff Koons in sharing an exploration of advanced manufacturing processes within his work, often taking the form of highly polished metal structures. Yet Levy is distinctly committed to an ideology of nature and natural materials despite his working with the constraints of industrial forms and manufacturing processes. Indeed he considers himself more of a “feeling” artist, this tactile association with nature fostered perhaps by his background and time spent in different corners of the globe.

To that extent, perhaps his harmonious approach disseminates his interest in the difficulties of categorisation within areas of the arts, where objects, critiqued in often abstract terms, as being either ‘design’ or ‘art’ are judged differently in terms of value, both financial and critical. In part this argument is addressed in the separation of his work into two volumes, with the second, companion volume Arik Levy: Design, being published next season.