Artist Resume
b. Johannesburg, South Africa.
South African and German citizen.
1991
Graduates at Woodmead High School, JHB, with distinction in Art.
1992 - 1996
BA Fine Arts from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
Dean’s Merit List; 3rd & 4th years.
Graduates with distinction in painting (BAFA Honours).
http://www.michaelis.uct.ac.za
1996 - 1998
Exhibitions :
Michaelis Graduate Show, Cape Town.
International Exhibition of Art Colleges in Hiroshima, Japan.
Johannesburg Biennale; ‘Cunning Stunts’ Jhb Fringe.
Warren Siebrits Group Show, Jhb.
1999 - 2018
Works primarily as a film director with intermittent painting practice (Film resume available on request).
Lives and works in London from 2002 to 2010.
2010
Returns to Cape Town to continue directing and painting.
Group Show ‘Big Wednesday’ at WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery, Cape Town. https://www.whatiftheworld.com
2011
Solo exhibition ‘Nature Ends’ - painted works with WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery, Cape Town. https://www.whatiftheworld.com
2012 - 2017
Continues in film.
2018
Moves into full time painting practice.
September - Exhibits painted works on Michaelis Alumni ‘ReGroup’ group show - 196 Victoria, Woodstock.
December - Exhibits painted works on ‘Penumbra’ group show - Desmond Tutu Inst. CT. Curated by Wendy Fredriksson.
2019
February - Kalashnikovv Gallery at Investec Art Fair, Cape Town. https://kalashnikovv.com
April - Project Room Solo exhibition at Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg. https://kalashnikovv.com
October - Group Exhibition - 131 Gallery, Woodstock, Cape Town. https://www.131agallery.com
2020
February - Group Exhibition - 131 Gallery, Woodstock, Cape Town. https://www.131agallery.com
February - Kalashnikovv Gallery at Investec Art Fair, Cape Town. https://kalashnikovv.com
March - Everard Read Cape Town - selected works on Autumn group show. https://www.everard-read.co.za
August - Solo Exhibition - 'Asymmetrical Identities' 131 Gallery, Woodstock, Cape Town.(Exhibition moved to online due to Covid) https://www.131agallery.com
2021
November/December - Group Exhibition - 131 Gallery, Woodstock, CT. https://www.131agallery.com
2022
Participating artist: INVICTUS - NFT Lab ‘Out Of Africa’ Collection https://cdn.invictuscapital.com/NFT/NFT_participating_art_collection.pdf
2023
April, Autumn Group Exhibition - 131 Gallery, Woodstock, CT. https://www.131agallery.com
September - Group Exhibition - Kevin Atkinson Retrospect - SMAC Galley, Woodstock, CT. https://www.smacgallery.com
October - Group Exhibition - I Never Promised You A Rose Garden - The Gallery - Cavalli Estate, Stellenbosch. https://cavalliestate.com/artboutique/gallery/
2024
April - Group Exhibition - I Never Promised You A Rose Garden part 2 - The Gallery - Cavalli Estate, Stellenbosch. https://cavalliestate.com/artboutique/gallery/
2025
June - Group Exhibition - Thresholds - Southern Guild Gallery - Cape Town.
https://southernguild.comavalli Estate, Stellenbosch. https://cavalliestate.com/artboutique/gallery/
2026
April/May - Solo Exhibition - Gold Ships - Southern Guild Gallery - Cape Town.
Painter based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Current Show: 16 April - 23 May 2026 'GOLD SHIPS' at Southern Guild, Cape Town.
https://southernguild.com/exhibitions/gold-ships
Painting is a system of communication with only one message: the sensation of being alive more intensely than normal. — Andrew Marr
This new body of work sees Levi deepen his investigation into the charged relationship between figure and landscape; an enquiry shaped by memory, cinematic fragments, familial mythologies, and the quiet labour of looking.
Levi’s path to painting has been circuitous. After graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1995, he spent nearly two decades working in the film industry before returning to a full-time painting practice. That sustained engagement with continues to shape the atmosphere of his canvases, which often feel like tender frames spliced from a longer unfolding narrative; stills held in delicate suspension between recognition and obscurity, recollection and invention.
“I paint people and landscapes,” Levi shares. “When a human figure enters a landscape, something comes alive. A story begins.”
In Gold Ships, landscapes operate as psychological terrain. Lakes, dense forest, and seas manifest as both remembered and imagined geographies. Levi describes his process as emerging from an expanding “scrapbook of images” drawn from photographic archives, travel, film and art history. Resisting linearity, he approaches making as an act of intuitive wandering – through time, image, and personal history.
The exhibition’s title gestures toward this process. Images, the artist suggests, pass continuously through the mind: characters, places, fleeting impressions. A few linger with singular intensity, rising to the surface like “gold ships.” These fragments become anchors, points of orientation around which his paintings gradually assemble.
Levi’s works unfold slowly. Colour operates as both emotional register and spatial device. Burnt orange skies open above teal seas, deep greens dissolve into dusk-like blue. Within these shifting environments, the figure becomes a catalyst for narrative possibility: a rider crossing a shoreline, dancers sketched like apparitions along a riverbank, a solitary body on horseback poised at the shore of an unnamed lake.
Certain works are more pointedly tethered to their source material. Wishing Well draws from a still in Stalker (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet science fantasy film, while Man and Horse (Paul and Drake’s Drum) reimagines a photograph of Paul McCartney on horseback. Queens of the Blue Sea recalls an image documenting the 2022 voyage of three women who crossed the Atlantic in a fifty-year-old catamaran.
For Levi, painting is fundamentally an act of attention. Making is a daily negotiation between intuition and structure. The hand remains visible on the surface, echoing the painterly urgency found in the work of artists like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, whose works Levi encountered during his early years of study. The exhibition also resonates with ideas articulated in A Short Book About Painting by Andrew Marr, where painting is described as a communicative system that conveys a single essential message: the heightened sensation of being alive.
Levi’s practice embraces this quality of aliveness, not through spectacle, but through an invitation to take pause and look. In a cultural moment defined by overwhelm and distraction, his works insist on a slower form of attention. Gold Ships resists fixed narrative, gesturing instead toward an open voyage; an invitation to inhabit an inner space where looking becomes a site of both encounter and connection.
Erin Katzeff
Previous excerpts:
Moving from film directing to full time painting practice in 2018, Daniel Levi's return solo show was called 'Please Accept My Resignation' held at Kalashnikov Gallery in Johannesburg in 2019.
Exerpt from review by South African arts journalist Robyn Sassen:
"It’s an intense and carefully honed debut for this young artist, which reveals both his painterly skill and his penchant for twisting sweetness to reveal something that’s difficult to get your head around, emotionally. Principles of Trust sees a figure masked and an interplay of worked up detail and gestural lines. The dotted eyelashes of the character represented here skirts between something evocatively violent and the old pretty traditions of easy schlocky art.
And as you look at each of these works, including Expansion, a painting of a dead bird, that give and take between life and death, light and dark, horror and sentimentality comes to the fore. It’s a modest yet explorative, internally rich yet outwardly almost hard-boiled debut, which demonstrates that Levi is someone to watch, as he matures."