Aubrey Levinthal

Aubrey Levinthal (b. 1986, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) bears witness to everyday life in an almost meticulous manner in her paintings. Inherent to her self-portraits, as well as images of friends, family, and ephemeral moments she picks up in her neighborhood, is a slow and diffuse sense of time. Her works use a palette of light greens, yellows, ochres, pastels, as well as darker colors, and their perspectives are often dislocated, evincing an air of melancholy and emotional imbalance. Her paintings oscillate between beauty and disillusionment, addressing loneliness as an accompanying phenomenon of our life in late capitalism, which is oriented towards performance and efficiency. Recently the critic John Lau has described her as: “one of the most interesting and engaging figurative painters at a time when many artists are working in this vein.” But that alone, he continued, is not what makes this artist special, “what distinguishes Levinthal from her contemporaries is her ability to evoke a state that speaks directly our daily sense of unease and vulnerability …having shown each year since 2016, she has staked out a singular territory marked by melancholy, isolation, tenderness, and gentle humor.” Aubrey Levinthal gained her BA from the University of Pennsylvania State University in 2008 and completed her MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2011. Her work has been shown extensively in the United States, most recently at the ICA, Boston, in A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, and at the Flag Foundation, New York. Levinthal lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.