Interrogating the medium of painting for over thirty years, Renée Levi is renowned for her large-scale and site-specific paintings that express her distinctively gestural and rhythmic abstractions. For Levi, now based in Switzerland, her birthplace of Istanbul provides a fundamental source of joy and inspiration that injects her Abstract Expressionist-inspired paintings with a tangible sense of vitality.

Sharing its title with her current exhibition Désirée at Öktem Aykut, Istanbul, the present work is one of at least a dozen painted in 2022 that express the artist’s emotions around returning to exhibit in this unique city. Galvanized by memories of her childhood spent in Istanbul, her recent works include monumental murals and ‘colour field’ paintings that offer surfaces on which contrasting colors complement one another in wide, immersive blocks and instinctively spray-painted forms. While the scale of her paintings varies, their installation in the gallery space is central to Levi’s approach, which stems from her architectural training and gestural methodology.

Renée Levi’s artwork has been exhibited internationally for more than twenty years, and appears in significant public and private collections. Having studied Architecture and Fine Arts, Levi has been a professor of painting at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel since 2001. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Villa du Parc, Annemasse (2021); Musée d’Art, Histoire et Archéologie d’Évreux, Évreux (2020) and the Biennale de Lyon (2019), as well as group exhibitions at MAMCO, Geneva (2021); Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2019) and Kunstverein München, Munich (2015). She was awarded the Prix de la Société des Arts de Genève in 2019 and the Prix Meret Oppenheim in 2002. She is also the winner of the public art competition of the Parliament Building in Bern, Switzerland, which will be completed in 2023.