ANNENKOV Yuri Georges (1889-1974) Self-portrait Bronze proof - Lot 63

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Of Polish origin, Léon LEVKOVITCH (1936-2025) graduated in 1960 from the École supérieure d'État des beaux-arts in Łódź, in the studio of Zdzisław Glowacki. From 1961, he

began his career as an artist in earnest, choosing to move to France. He became part of a form of Jewish expressionism now firmly rooted in Europe, producing

powerful landscapes and portraits in oil on canvas, Indian ink and gouache on paper. In these years, the young painter met Ossip Zadkine,

Zoran Music and Josef Czapski.

He had his first solo exhibition in 1969 at the Abel Rosemberg gallery in Paris, which specialized in what contemporaries were already describing as the Nouvelle

Ecole de Paris. The result was more singular, more intimate compositions: figures began to pile up and intertwine; white highlights blurred the colors

and the thicker material allows contours to be hollowed out. The artist's sculptor's soul comes alive.

In 1970, once he had completed his studies at the lithography workshop of the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he travelled every year for over 30 years to the famous Pietrasanta foundries in Italy. There, he created terracotta and bronze proofs, largely inspired by the myths and constructions of Antiquity. In a 2006 interview with André Wawrenczak, he spoke of his fascination with the Etruscan Tarquin dynasty, the Great Sphinx of Egypt and the collar bones on the capitals of the Parthenon. By crossing all these forms, he creates a singular bestiary that questions man's relationship with his roots. From his tiny proofs to the oversized terraces of his large sculptures, faces, zoomorphic figures and ruined colonnades come to life and intertwine. It's a world in fusion, on the cusp of creation, between chaos and harmony: life bubbles up, but form is not definitive.

In parallel with his presentation in Parisian galleries such as Galerie les Singuliers in 1998, he felt the need to exhibit more widely in Poland, notably in Warsaw and Lodz, where he met with great success. In the latter part of his life, he increasingly turned to drawing. The figures and their arrangement in space are more structured, and the color becomes whiter. "Paper and pencil remain my daily bread [...] painting invests sculpture and sculpture invests painting", he declares. The artist died in 2025, leaving behind a profoundly singular body of work, the subject of numerous institutional acquisitions, notably at the museums of Haifa, Strasbourg, Paris and the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Ugo LEVOYER