Levikova Bella Alexandrovna

Nancy and Norton Dodge Collection, Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA Kolodzei Art Foundation, USA Private collections in Russia, France, and Greece Galerie de France, Paris, France

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1989 (with A. Dubovik). Munich, Germany 1990, Gallery 'Regina', Moscow GROUP EXHIBITIONS 1974 '2nd Autumn Outdoor Painting Review'. Izmailovo Forest Park, Moscow 'Preliminary Apartment Previews for the All-Union Exhibition'. Apartment of O. Rabin, Moscow 1975-80, Painting exhibitions at the City Committee of Graphic Artists. M. Gruzinskaya, 28, Moscow 1982 'Naive Art and Avant-garde' (one day). Central House of Artists, Moscow One-day exhibition. House of Artists on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow Group '21' exhibition. M. Gruzinskaya, 28, Moscow 1986 '21 Artists'. M. Gruzinskaya, 28, Moscow 1987 'Object-I'. M. Gruzinskaya, 28, Moscow 'Retrospective of Moscow Artists' Work. 1957-1987'. Club 'Hermitage', Profsoyuznaya St., 100, Moscow 1988 ARCO-88. Soviet Contemporary Art. Galerie de Collection Kniga, Madrid, Spain; Kostaki Gallery, Athens, Greece 'SOTHEBY’S. Russian Avant-Garde and Soviet Contemporary Art'. World Trade Center, Moscow 1989 'Art Contemporain Sovietique peintres et sculptures'. Palais des Congres, Versailles, France Russische Gemalde der Avant-Garde. Auktionshaus J.Weiner. Sales Exhibition, Munich, Germany 1990 'Soviet Contemporary Art'. Habsburg, Feldman, Soho, New York, USA; Zurich, Switzerland 1992 'Art Firsthand, or Apology of Shyness'. Gallery 'Regina', Moscow 1993 'Adresse provisoire pour l’art contemporain russe'. Musee de la Poste, Paris, France 1995 'From the collection of Tanya and Natasha Kolodzei'. Gallery 'Seven Nails'. Russian-American Press Center, Moscow

On my own grounds, from an inner freedom, in 1965 a Beginning arose (which I interpreted as the 'Struggle of Two'). The work consisted in managing the inexplicable... I was interested in meanings... Matisse struck me with an unexpected, unthinkable organization... Malevich—with meaning and organization... In my work today there are no personal themes, but they helped me at the start of the Path... Reading myself from Space-Time, perhaps I approach understanding... What matters is not the state, but Where to. There, where Differences dissolve. I mean, when we approach one another... It is no accident that human Consciousness is coded in almost the same way for all of humanity. We are all kin. But Consciousness, it is at the end. Childhood contains within itself all forms of Consciousness. The mechanism ensuring the Unity of the child with the Whole World was revealed to me. Space-Time is not neutral coordinates, but powerful and mysterious forces. The child is inscribed in the space-time continuum. The mechanism ensuring relevance, the ordering of real Space, and the exit beyond its limits, is 'built into' it... A child can roughly but accurately reflect the Unity of the world (topology and metric). Children are topologists. 'They feel the unity between a coffee cup and a donut,' as Jean Piaget roughly wrote. Childlike transparency (a whole with the world), freedom from 'self', and so much more... including original purity, ensures the passage of the truth of vision. Truth is the most natural thing in the world, and all else creates confusion (for example, the intellect with its intricacies). As one moves away from purity... a person loses the ability to contemplate meaning... I have experienced several realities... an abundance of vibrations, forms, dominant states (the priority of bodily emotions, or of reasoning), all with the same grounds... Yet, my Process seems to follow a certain order. The outline of the order: process, transitional periods, unfoldings, special switching points in the system (milestones), new transformations, folding. These parameters are built into everyone. Here, knowledge is not thought, but the possibility of a new type of perception and awareness through Light, which becomes more abundant in me over the years... The structural knowledge of this new perception (the next, never-before-seen) becomes a discovery for me: new measures, quantities and qualities of color, and ways of connecting elements... There arises a feeling of touching a deep mystery... New inequalities are revealed, the freshness of relations between parts is restored... These are transitions from uncertainty to certainty, a re-forging at every moment of one's own history of Consciousness into a unity of new meaning... The miracle of Consciousness is that it restores, leads to Light (to a new vision) exactly when it renounces what was found. That is, it lives by dying, not by repeating, but by the power of forgetting everything found... Sometimes (more often lately) Consciousness turns into a form of rapid and involuntary response to future events. Time used to be divided into present, past and future. Now it flows toward me from the future and possesses predictability. My life cycle underlies the Process. This is the story of self-change, struggle, the exposure of personal ambitions, seeming virtue. It is a focus on the conjunction of opposites, sequences, distinctions of measures, quantities, qualities, ways of connection, the category of number. This is the history of the Process as opposed to Experience. It is a hierarchy of forms, methods, the connectivity of everything with everything... The history of ways of thinking and their overcoming. The history of growth points. Of Light and Darkness. The history of the creative force and the transformation of Mind. The history of continuous existence. The history of seeing (not recognizing) and various types of interaction. It is repentance and purification. It is the history of Consciousness, the experience of Love and Death. It is the history of deep Unity and pronounced difference...