Mar 29, 2024
Dan Levenson is a visual artist based in Los Angeles
who engages in installation, performance, video, painting, and
sculpture. His artistic endeavors revolve around the concept of an
imagined institution, the State Art Academy, Zürich (SKZ). Dan's paintings
adhere to the formalist teachings of this fictitious academy,
employing metrically sized canvases divided geometrically to
produce rational and reproducible abstract compositions. Through
performance, installation, and video, he further develops the
narrative of this fictional institution. Each painting bears a
unique title, symbolizing a student from the State Art Academy,
Zürich, with no repetition of names. In 2004, Dan used a computer
script to generate hundreds of millions of distinct names by
combining surnames from the Zürich phone book with common Swiss
first names. From this extensive list, 135,000 names were randomly
selected and published in a book, with the titles of his paintings
drawn from the same pool in random order.