In layered, atmospheric paintings, Aubrey Levinthal (b. 1986; Philadelphia, PA) chronicles the quotidian and commonplace with an emotional and psychological intensity drawn from a host of art historical references. Mining her own life for subject material for her portraits and still lifes, Levinthal captures moments of quiet domesticity and the subtle, seasonal textures of her native Philadelphia. The women in Levinthal’s paintings—many of whom resemble the artist, with their dark hair tied in the artist’s signature topknot—go about the activities of their day: they work, eat, tend to children, read, commute, run errands.
A formal preoccupation with shape and color drives Levinthal’s compositional experimentation. Working primarily on panel, she builds her paintings slowly over time, laying down thin washes of oil paint, before scraping and rubbing them away to reveal the layers beneath. Her process lends the paintings a film of time which she counters, in part, by the banal contemporaneity of many of the objects interspersed throughout her paintings; phone chargers, Tupperware containers, and over-the-ear headphones firmly locate these works in the present. With these objects—which appear in conversation with drooping flowers, lone vases, and bowls of fruit—Levinthal introduces new elements to the timeless vocabulary of still-life symbolism.
Throughout her work, Levinthal channels a host of art historical source material—from the atmospheric perspective, overlapping figural arrangements, and multiplicity of perspectives found in the work of Early Renaissance masters like Giotto and Masaccio to the captivating light of Pierre Bonnard’s domestic scenes and the psychological depth of portraits by Gwen John and Alice Neel. Drawing on these histories, Levinthal imbues her work with a sense of stillness and solitude, allowing her figures to contend with an unease or ambivalence about their lives and identities. Dissolving boundaries and shifting and multiplying perspectives, Levinthal lends her compositions an ethereal, dreamlike quality as she gently probes her subjects’ interiority.
Levinthal’s work is featured in a number institutional collections, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia; Ballinglen Museum of Art, County Mayo, Ireland; the Beth Rudin Dewoody Collection, West Palm Beach, FL; the Flag Art Foundation, New York; the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; the Danjuma Collection, Esher, UK; the Kriket Foundation, Berlin; and the X Museum, Beijing, among others. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Flag Art Foundation in New York in 2023, and she has been featured in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum MORE, Gorssel, Netherlands; the Xiao Museum, Rizhao, China; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Ballinglen Museum of Art, County Mayo, Ireland; the Painting Center, New York; and the Queens College Arts Center, New York, among others. She was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant for early career representational artists in 2013, 2016, and 2019. In 2017, Levinthal participated in the Ballinglen Arts Foundation Residency in County Mayo, Ireland. She earned an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a BA from Pennsylvania State University. She lives and works in Philadelphia.