AlefBet is a judaica store in Rome, Italy.
Gabriele Levy (Buenos Aires, 1958 - ) lives and works in Italy. After a military service in the Sharpshooters (“Bersaglieri”), Levy worked for a year at a wholesaler of gold and diamonds, learning to observe transparent matter stony in a microscope.
In 1980 the artist moved to Israel, where he worked first in Kibbutz Bet Nir with artists Moshe Shek ("Juk"), and C. Kalman, producing clay products, concrete and iron with Shek, while learning the techniques of collage of fabrics by Kalman.
"Taken" also there to the army, Levy finds himself in a war that is not his own, writing a long diary and some short stories about the beautiful and weird close encounters perfectly peaceful he had with the "enemy". During the tragicomic but traumatic war in Lebanon, Levy starts to transform the empty tank shells, cutting them with a blowtorch to make an umbrella stand, or turn old iron pipes into a bike rack.
In 1983 is the time of plastics, and Levy is a laborer at a factory (ELCAM), where he injects and extrudes plastics, dealing with molds and resins, PVC and polycarbonates, pressures and temperatures, computers and statistical process control.
The idea of a new 3D art is born in this era, where he learned the use of the 3D transformation from negative to positive using casting molds, an idea that he will resume after producing the plaster and silicon molds of the hebrew letters, powerfull tools to reduce the production time of the piece, and obviously its unit cost.
Levy graduated as a technician at the Rupin Plastics Institute, then studied at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), undergraduating in 1988 in Industrial Engineering and Management and Computer Sciences Technical Engineering. In this period he made a lot of jobs:the painter, the sweeper, the night watchman, technical interpreter, the programmer in FORTRAN, the fishman, the collector of apples and citrus fruits, the bartender, the chef, the factory worker, the patent translator.
In 1992 Levy returns to Italy, and the editor Franco Angeli publish his book about materials requirements planning; meanwhile the sculptor begins to produce clay tiles in high relief with a hebrew letter.