The American artist who invented a Zurich art academy

A Zurich art academy with no building, faculty or official record has acquired the visual density of a real institution. Dan Levenson, an artist based in Los Angeles, has spent years constructing the Staatliche Kunstakademie Zürich, known as the SKZ. Its classrooms, exercises, graduates, furniture and social life exist through his exhibitions, performances and publications. The project now includes 135,000 invented names, a fictional gallery and a network of businesses and meeting places that give the academy an alumni culture.

Levenson makes paintings based on colour scales and elementary geometric forms. He presents aprons that appear long used, furniture marked by studio work and installations showing classrooms supposedly salvaged from the SKZ's ruins. Some objects carry evidence of real use. Others have been deliberately aged through sanding, water and prolonged exposure to weather.

The work demands close attention to how institutions become believable. A name beneath a painting, a worn apron or a wooden shipping crate can imply decades of teaching, production and exchange. Levenson has never presented the SKZ as a lost Swiss academy. Its fiction is public. The artistic experiment lies in watching that fiction accumulate the material signs of history.

The SKZ's archive began with a computer-generated list of 135,000 names. In 2004, Levenson combined surnames from Zurich's telephone directory with common Swiss first names. He gathered the results in a book and has used them ever since as a finite pool for painting titles. Names such as Hanneli Frick, Ramona Gutknecht and Christoph Randegger appear below works, although none refers to a real artist. Levenson selects the names in random order and does not repeat them.

The rule gives the fictional academy a bureaucratic texture. It also places Zurich's civic records inside a Los Angeles art practice. A telephone directory, stripped of its original function, becomes a source of authorship, biography and institutional memory. Each name suggests a student who attended classes, developed a style and left work behind.

The paintings deepen that suggestion. Levenson explores colour scales and basic geometric forms, exercises associated with foundational art education. Their surfaces may look older than the project itself because he accelerates their deterioration. Hairline cracks, stains and worn edges supply the physical evidence of a past that the viewer knows was constructed.

Swiss names carry particular weight here because Levenson chose a language and place he cannot fully access. “It really appeals to me to make art in a language that is foreign to me,” he says.

Levenson has supplied the SKZ with the everyday infrastructure of an art scene. According to the academy's fictional history, its graduates sell work through Little Switzerland, a gallery supposedly founded in the mid-1990s by idealistic former students. Tsüri Logistik, another invented company, sends paintings in sturdy wooden crates. Students wait for paint to dry while smoking the fabricated Letzte tobacco or eating at Rösti-Wirt, a fast-food restaurant dedicated to Switzerland's national dish.

These details place the academy within a recognisable European art-world pattern. Major scenes gather around galleries, cafés, bars, printers, transport firms and informal meeting points. Levenson gives each service a name and a visual identity, allowing the fictional students to move through a complete economy of artistic life.

The Rösti-Wirt is especially pointed in its local reference. The name invokes a dish strongly associated with Switzerland, while the restaurant performs the role played by famous artist hangouts such as the Moulin Rouge or Max's Kansas City. The result is a social map rather than a single artwork. Viewers encounter the habits, commerce and folklore that might surround a school after generations of graduates have passed through it.

Levenson's installations also include two classrooms presented as remnants recovered from the SKZ's destruction. Their damaged appearance turns exhibition design into historical evidence.