Abuse, 2019

Gosha Levochkin  

Gosha Levochkin is a Russian American painter, best known for his larger scale acrylic works in the tradition of ligne claire. As a child, he abruptly moved to Hollywood from Moscow, just one year after the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Being a child of immigration, he learned very early on about the importance of adaptation as a cultural survival skill. The embodiment of this skill has been a coherent and prevalent theme throughout his life's work to this point. Gosha dropped out of high school to pursue art and work at a local art supply store called Blue Rooster in Los Angeles California. While there, he was able to converse with and gain insight from many of LA's most notable artists. Through this, he immersed himself into obsessively learning every masters tool and technique behind acrylic painting, watercolor painting, and drawing. His intuitive knack for developing unique characters, a dynamic use of space, and the keen ability to tell a story in his paintings, quickly brought him notoriety and gallery attention within the contemporary Los Angeles art world. Through a decade plus of building his career in LA, Levochkin held solo exhibitions and took part in group shows in many of the city's most prevalent galleries. During this time he worked closely alongside with artists like Rob Sato, Maxwell Mcmaster, Devin Liston, and assisted for Benjamin Jones. In 2015 Gosha moved to New York City. 

Levochkin's un-identifiable characters both create and solve problems within the spatial environment of the canvas. Each piece can be interpreted as some kind of worldly event in which these characters, who naturally dismiss the bounds of cultural hegemony, must harmoniously connect to over come and adapt to the situation they are in. This connectivity creates a sculpturesque confluence of human like figures and objects, who together make up a forceful puzzle to solve the mayhem. Gosha's use of space can be observed as both elemental and structural. Though it is geometrically premeditated, it is highly rooted in the substance of nature. One can get an overwhelming sense of mutualism and respect between all components that make a single Levochkin composition.