Born 1992 in New Lebanon, NY
Lives and works in New York, NY

Tali Levi’s work creates thresholds between structure and eruption, stasis and animism. The artist’s practice examines material resilience, form and fragility, describing his paintings as ‘sites of slow unravelling’. 

Levi’s practice is material-driven. Working with mediums across a spectrum of viscosity: synthetic rubber, latex paint, acrylic, glue, and pencil, his paintings are assembled by painting uncured synthetic rubber, which is then stretched and collaged atop canvases. The resultant effect resembles pools of solvent in different stages of transmission, girdled by angular planes. Taking on the fractal-like appearance of light interference across leaking pools of petrol, or genomes partitioning, the works create a central, recurring tension between balance and domination, flux and sparseness. Citing influences as disparate as rural decay, Japanese ceramics, early animation, and photographic abstraction, Levi’s works cultivate a kind of biochemical punk. They evoke the residue of a factory floor – tertiary sludge still host to strange, unintended reactions, where the material itself becomes an index of time, material, and chance.

Though abstract, the dynamism of Levi’s materials compell narrative readings. Extending the work’s material-driven logic, the paintings take on a strange subjectivity, gently undermining a Western perspectivist tradition. Much like Freud’s animism, Jung’s unconscious, or more recently, James Bridle’s network-technology ecosystems, the paintings take on the hive-mind of the organism, operating on a micro level with unknown, myriad agencies. Paint stretches across the works with quasi-parasitic impulse,  shapes stretch and metamorphose with unknown, crystalline vectors; pooled forms burst and recede at will; delicate pencil motifs splinter and regenerate, governed by mysterious biologies.

The resultant aesthetic is somewhere between the hyper-contemporary – the lexical fields of transmission and duplication – while simultaneously reminiscent of primeval gaseous pools, and ancient, calcified elements oxidised over years between rock layers, frozen in moments of unfolding. At the heart of these works is an ontological preoccupation: Levi’s use of suspended animation charting questions of being and becoming, permanence and transformation, reactions that have happened long ago, and reactions that remain in the process of unravelling.

Through viscous, sticky, extrusions, Levi’s practice articulates unfamiliar poetics of relation, creating potent sites of exchange, projection, and mutation.

Recent solo and group exhibitions include. 'If You Swallowed the Floor Whole', ADZ, Lisbon (2023), The Century House Historical Society (2022). Levi previously founded and directed Basin gallery in Philadelphia (2017-2018). They received a BFA from SUNY Purchase in 2014.