Courtyard by Marriott Philadelphia South at The Navy Yard
The Shape of a Line
Cheryl Levin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA. She started drawing and painting at the age of twelve when her father brought home a How to Draw Book for children and asked which one of his three girls was interested. At the end of the book were instructions showing how to draw a woman carrying a basket of fruit on her head. This was to become Levin’s subject matter in 1984 when she began painting people, portraits and single-parent families after studying art Rome, Italy. During her time abroad, she was greatly influenced by ancient Etruscan and Roman art. When her own two children were young and her family life became more complicated she turned to abstract art as a way to conceptualize new realities. And after the death of her husband, artist blacksmith Robert Phillips, in 2012, she began to produce art as a eulogy. Using “metal cut-offs” salvaged from Phillips’ studio, Levin moved his “remains around” to reorient herself through her grieving state and to organize chaos from death. She soon progressed to other formats, including installation pieces as an outgrowth from those works. Her work currently focuses on a search to develop a minimalist personal language to describe “the void” -(loss)- either individual or collective by beginning to incorporate the newfound knowledge that many family members were killed in the Holocaust.
