NINA LEVETT IS A VIENNA-BASED ARTIST, DESIGNER AND CREATIVE THINKER WORKING ACROSS ART, PATTERN, OBJECTS AND SPACE

ABOUT NINA

Nina Levett is best known for her bold patterns, drawings and highly personal approach to ornament. Her work moves freely between art and design—appearing on walls, rugs, cars, porcelain, textiles, furniture and objects.

She is interested in what happens when a drawing refuses to stay on paper.

Over the course of her career, Nina has worked across art, design, architecture and interiors, collaborating with galleries, manufacturers, craftspeople and international brands. Her projects have included a hand-knotted rug produced in India, porcelain and product design, large-scale interiors, an Alfa Romeo created for the company’s 100th anniversary, a sailing boat, and her ongoing Porsche Cayenne art car, Therapy on Wheels.

Her work has been shown internationally and is represented in the permanent collection of the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.

But Nina’s work has never followed a particularly straight line.

Before concentrating fully on art and design, she studied the way organisations, architecture and physical spaces influence human behaviour. Her academic work explored the metaphor of the machine in organisations and later the office as a disciplining environment. That interest never disappeared. It simply moved into her art.

Today she is interested in patterns, colour, domestic life, value, visibility, ambition and the strange border between what we call art and what we dismiss as decoration.

Nina lives and works in Vienna.

SELECTED WORK & COLLABORATIONS

MAK – Museum of Applied Arts Vienna
Alessi
Absolut Vodka
Alfa Romeo
Budja Galerie
Design Criminal
Jona Cerwinske
Porsche Art Car – Therapy on Wheels
Hand-knotted rug production in India
Interior, textile, surface and object projects

PATTERNS

Patterns are at the centre of Nina’s work.

Flowers, animals, faces, lines and ornamental fragments multiply until an individual drawing becomes a surface. A pattern can then escape the page and become almost anything: wallpaper, fabric, clothing, porcelain, a rug, a room—or an entire car.

For Nina, ornament is not something added after the important work is finished.

The ornament is the work.

CARS

Nina has always been interested in putting art where people don’t necessarily expect to find it.

That has included cars.

Her projects include an Alfa Romeo created around the company’s 100th anniversary and her 2003 Porsche Cayenne S art car, Therapy on Wheels.

The Porsche is part artwork, part vehicle and part ongoing experiment. Nina drives it. Things break. It goes to the mechanic. It comes home. The artwork continues.

She likes objects that remain alive after they become art.

ROOMS

Nina thinks through rooms.

Furniture moves. Walls change colour. Objects accumulate. Something gets thrown out. Something else gets dragged home.

Her interest in interiors goes back to her academic work on architecture and organisations, but it has become increasingly personal. A room can influence how we behave, what we make and even what we believe is possible.

For Nina, rearranging a room can sometimes be the beginning of a new piece of work.

DRAWING

Nina draws because drawing is one of the fastest ways she knows to turn a thought into something physical.

She doesn’t necessarily begin with a finished product in mind.

A drawing might remain a drawing. Or it might become a postcard, pattern, dress, wallpaper, rug, painting, ceramic object or something that hasn’t been invented yet.

That uncertainty is part of the process.

COLLECTING

Nina collects ideas almost compulsively.

Photographs. Objects. Screenshots. Furniture. Colours. Conversations. Sentences. Materials. Things found on the street. Things she probably doesn’t need.

Her problem has never been finding ideas.

It is deciding which ones deserve to become real.

Much of her creative practice is therefore less about searching for inspiration and more about building systems that allow ideas to leave her head and enter the physical world.

LATE BLOOMING

Nina doesn’t believe a creative career has to develop according to a sensible timetable.

Her own has repeatedly changed direction.

She has been an academic, artist, designer, interior consultant, mother, property owner and entrepreneur. Some periods produced exhibitions. Others produced children, houses, businesses, drawings, unfinished projects or simply a different understanding of what she wanted.

She increasingly sees all of it as material.

There isn’t a separate creative life and real life.

The life is the work.

WRITING

Nina writes to discover what she thinks.

A bicycle left in the wrong room, a drawing, a broken car, an argument about money or an unfinished renovation can open into much larger questions about work, motherhood, ambition, creativity, freedom and visibility.

She is currently developing writing about creativity and the lessons collected through a life of making, changing direction, starting again and refusing to fit neatly into a single professional category.

VIENNA

Nina lives and works in Vienna.

The city—its ornament, architecture, apartments, history, contradictions and particular mixture of beauty and severity—has inevitably found its way into her visual language.

Her work may travel, but Vienna remains the place where most of the thinking, drawing, rearranging, writing and making begins.

KEEP IN TOUCH

New drawings, patterns, objects, experiments and stories appear here as they happen.