Michael Gac Levin

Michael Gac Levin’s paintings evoke the mystery and the intensity of childhood. At the core of his work is a playful, diaristic drawing practice guided by repetition and humor. Riding a wobbly line down into memory, he finds images that speak to our predicament in the present and the uncertainty of the future. His reflective, dreamlike compositions offer views of a world in which everything is animate and purposeful. A world where anything might suddenly rise to speak, stalk or slink. A sense of archaic monumentality pervades the images, but objects feel as soft and yielding as a pillow fort or a loaf of bread. Flipping father-knows-best, Gac Levin pulls his motifs from collaborative drawing with his two young children. Playing, not-knowing, accident-prone and enchanted, they model what it means to be an artist. Ancient truth can be found fresh their way, in a grove where the shared outer world trips and falls into the private inner one. Getting in there is what it’s all about.

Michael Gac Levin was born in Los Angeles in 1984. His latest solo exhibition took place at My Pet Ram, New York, in 2024, preceded by presentations at Hexum Gallery, Montpelier, VT; and at Parts & Labor, San Antonio, TX. He has shown extensively in group exhibitions, including at The Hole and Deanna Evans Projects, New York; at Marvin Gardens, Brooklyn; as well as online with Taymour Grahne and Platform. His work has been featured in Artmaze Magazine and Maake Magazine, and he has completed special projects online for the Jewish Museum and SCREEN_. He has been an artist-in-residence at The North Dakota Museum of Art, The Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Parts & Labor, and the Vermont Studio Center. He holds an MFA from Pratt Institute (2015), where he joined the faculty in 2017,  and a BA from the University of Chicago (2006).

BA University of Chicago ’06
MFA Pratt Institute ’15