NEW YORK, NY.- Congratulations to Matvey Levenstein, who has been announced as a recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant. Levenstein’s delicate and exquisitely rendered paintings explore themes of history and representation. His paintings and works on paper are filtered through the most traditional painterly genres—the landscape, the still life, and the portrait—and are imbued with a distinctly literary sensitivity; they are quiet meditations on the relevance of Romanticism in the 21st Century.

Unrestricted grants from the Tiffany Foundation have been awarded to 20 artists working in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, craft, and new media. The purpose of the grants are to give artists the opportunity to produce new work and push the boundaries of their creativity. A full-color catalogue documenting the work of grant recipients will be published this spring.

Levenstein was born in Moscow, U.S.S.R. and lives and works in New York City. He received his M.F.A. at Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT, after attaining a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, and the Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow, U.S.S.R. He has been the recipient of a number of awards including the Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome, Rome; the Penny McCall Foundation Award, New York; the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Studio Grant; the Katherine J. Horwitch Grant, Jewish Foundation; and the Anna Louise Raymond Traveling Fellowship, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Click to view The Possibility of the Sublime a conversation between Levenstein and curator, critic, and writer Jarrett Earnest on the occasion of his 2021 solo exhibition at Kasmin. Filmed in the studio as part of The Kasmin Review's In Conversation series, Earnest and Levenstein discuss his paintings in relation to film and the object-image relationship.