Artist Dan Levenson

The Lydian Spin

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.