BERLIN.- On the occasion of this year’s Berlin Art Week, the exhibition From the Sleep Side presents a cross-generational and transcontinental survey of three artists, placing contemporary figurative painting in a historical dialogue. It focuses on new works by the US American artist Aubrey Levinthal (b. 1986) whose recent paintings are placed in a direct visual and thematic relationship with works by Biala (Janice Biala, 1903—2000) and Tal R (b. 1967), both of whom serve as significant points of reference and sources of inspiration for Levinthal.
The poet Anne Carson once described a disorienting dream about entering her living room at night to find all the lights on. Nothing was wrong, everything was in its usual place, »and yet it was utterly, certainly, different«. Later, she explains the strangeness of the dream to herself by deciding that she must have »caught the living room sleeping. I had entered it from the sleep side«. In this selection of paintings by Aubrey Levinthal, Biala, and Tal R, a similar sensation is at work—that there is some furtive other ›side‹ to the rooms and objects that we live among; that the secret lies just beyond the ordinariness of what we see. The works gathered here play at the thin membrane between the utterly familiar and the utterly strange. Tensions are formed between the tactile proximity of intimate, homely spaces and the cryptic distance of closed eyes and mirrors painted shut.
Thematically, the exhibition revolves around a paradox: how does the strictly private become universally applicable, and how do painters of different generations approach this challenge? The three artists share an affinity for the subtle loosening and disorienting of seemingly familiar situations. For Biala and Levinthal, this often occurs through the unexpected slanting or flattening of perspective in still lives and domestic scenes. Shelves, windowsills, tables, and tiled floors tilt sharply upwards to meet your gaze—their objects oddly suspended among this altered geometry—or slope away into shadowy void-space. In Tal R’s brightly coloured, cartoon-like paintings and his abstract ›Milk versus Beef‹, lines and angles stray, space feels soft, malleable, dreamlike.
Biala was a Jewish, Polish-born American artist celebrated for bridging a transatlantic dialogue between European Modernism and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Her renderings of space, light, and surface feel lived-in—intimate and tactile, but with a gentle instability that speaks to the motion and relationality of things in the world: the circulation of objects through rooms, picked up, put down, moved around a house by the lives that live among them. In ›Black Still Life with Artichokes‹, pots and cups seem barely held together, their forms and colours half-adrift. In ›Standing Figure (Girl with Slatbacked chair)‹, a woman’s pose is full-frontal yet enigmatic—smile and hands on the brink of spectral dissolve.
Tal R is an Israeli-born Danish painter, known for a distinctive, bold visual language that combines influences from Outsider and Folk art, Expressionism, Symbolism, and Fauvism. The artist himself uses the Hebrew word kolbojnik, or ›leftovers‹, to describe the medley of his source material. In ›Mirror‹, plush curtains surround an ornate mirror, its reflection painted mysteriously shut. In Antique, too, something appears painted out or censored: a ghoulish, viscous negation dangles beside the window display of an antique store.
The US American painter Aubrey Levinthal paints from daily life, maintaining a delicate balance between melancholy and warmth, community and isolation. Her figures are often women, and often as close-seeming as they are distant and unreachable, absorbed in thought, sleeping, or daily errands. In this selection of new paintings she plays with the gaze, sending it through windows, through a bunch of geraniums, fragmented through reflections in mirrors. Figures are enclosed in close, cropped, and sunken spaces. We are never quite in the room, but looking in from some other, indistinct place. In ›Summer Mirror with Woman’s Head‹, a resting woman’s bun of hair rhymes with the spiralled fist of a seashell and the effect is strangely haunting. Like Anne Carson’s dream of the sleeping living room, it seems on the verge of turning to reveal some withheld secret. One could recall the repeating vision of Madeleine’s coiled hair in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the desire to reach into this image, draw something out from its ›other side‹—and at the same time, the knowledge that there is maybe nothing more to it than the bewitching effect of small coincidence.
The exhibition not only offers viewers a profound insight into Aubrey Levinthal’s artistic thought process and highlights direct sources of inspiration for a younger generation of painters; it also restores an artistic presence and visibility to an artist like Biala, who was forced to leave Europe in 1939 as a Polish-born Jewish immigrant. Her paintings continue to resonate powerfully within the context of contemporary painting and female subjectivity today.
Biala’s work has been exhibited only once before in Berlin in 1966 at the Amerika-Haus in Berlin in the group exhibition ›10 Américains de Paris‹. Although her 1962 painting ›Untitled (Three Glasses)‹ was shown in 2022 at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam as part of the exhibition ›The Shape of Freedom: International Abstraction after 1945‹, this current exhibition marks a premiere in Berlin itself after exactly 60 years.
