Biography
William Leavitt (* 1941, Washington D.C. US) is part of the first generation of California Conceptual artists. Through his installations, drawings, paintings, play and sound performances, Leavitt re-examines the production of the Western imaginary, as imposed by the “Hollywood factory.” He draws from the domestic and industrial landscapes of Los Angeles, and often includes fragments of modernist architecture and references to popular culture.
Leavitt began to study art in his twenties, and obtained his BFA at the University of Colorado and his MFA at Claremont Graduate University in California. His early work conceived of the gallery as a theatre, and his installations acted as a form of stage set: “At the time we called those works “environments.” But they weren’t really environments. They were sort of sculptures where I used trees and lights and sound.” His interest in theatre resulted in the writing of several playscripts, such as California Patio (1972) and The Silk (1975).
Leavitt's use of conventions drawn from cinema and theater questions the differences between art and artifice. The line between the real and the imagined in Leavitt's work is abrupt in some places and blurry in others. Leavitt’s work, made of a range of media from construction materials, domestic objects to traditional painting, recalls the generic sets of daytime dramas. Shrubs, trees, exercise equipment, and buildings, along with a whole host of other natural and manufactured elements, exist in the same picture plane, improbably positioned adjacent to one another in odd scenes of contemporary American life. These items, however, are abandoned by those who would use them, leaving them hovering in their compositions deserted by people.
In the 1980s, employing conventions of architectural rendering and theater set design, Leavitt made hundreds of pastel drawings depicting domestic interiors devoid of human figures but charged with drama. In the 1990s, he made drawings and paintings of exteriors, portraying iconic Los Angeles buildings with irony, exaggerating their form and ornament to make them look incongruous, or illuminate the fantasy inherent in them. He also began doing triptychs that merge ancient and modern imagery in variation on a visual timeline. Science fiction motifs, integral to the architecture of Southern California, have become more prominent in his work of recent years.
William Leavitt lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2019); Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Genève, (2017); Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH, Zurich (2014); Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); and LAXART, Los Angeles (2009).
His workcan be found in the collections of Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.