Untitled (Primary Title)
Jill Levine, American, born 1953 (Artist)
Fifty Works for Fifty States: In 2008, in a unique partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Vogels distributed twenty-five hundred works across the country, giving fifty works to one art museum in each of the fifty states. This exhibition, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, showcases the fifty works VMFA received as part of that initiative, which bears the same title. As a diverse and rich body of work, the Vogels' generous giftattests to their passion and commitment to sharing contemporary art with the public.
Jill Levine Made from standard Styrofoam balls and cones covered in Bondo and painted, Levine's intimately scaled wall sculptures transform basic factory-produced shapes into bizarre, impractical objects. The disjuncture between the title, Suzy Hates Nancy, and the abstract biomorphic form of the sculpture suggests an ambiguous narrative between opposing forces. Do the cones represent Suzy and Nancy? Are the balls fodder thrown back and forth? Her watercolor repeats the contrast between round shapes and diagonal lines in two dimensions rather than three, emphasizing a symbiotic relationship between elemental forms at the center of her artistic practice.
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