AUBREY LEVINTHAL

Best known for intimate portraits and still lifes that capture domestic scenes and interior states, Levinthal works primarily in oil on panel, using a muted, atmospheric palette and layered surfaces. Her paintings often depict women who resemble the artist herself, moving through daily routines that feel at once ordinary and psychologically charged. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York and Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh and featured in group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Museum MORE in the Netherlands, and the Xiao Museum in China, among others.

Early life and Career

Born in 1986 in Philadelphia, Levinthal studied Visual Arts and Sociology at Pennsylvania State University before completing an MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). This combination of studio training and social observation underpins her sustained interest in the emotional texture of ordinary life and the small social rituals of the home, street, and workplace.

Levinthal has remained largely rooted in Philadelphia, working in a shared studio building and keeping regular daylight hours that mirror the rhythms she paints. Early exhibitions with galleries such as Monya Rowe Gallery in New York and M+B in Los Angeles helped establish her as a distinctive voice in contemporary figurative painting, focused on the psychological weight of everyday scenes rather than overt spectacle.

Works, Series and Methods

Levinthal’s paintings are recognisable for their soft, hazy surfaces, compressed spaces, and figures that seem to hover between presence and disappearance. She often layers thin washes of oil and then scrapes them back with a blade, creating translucent skin tones and worn interiors that suggest memory as much as direct observation. In many works, tabletops tilt steeply toward the viewer and backgrounds flatten into patterned planes, so that objects and bodies appear slightly off-balance, intensifying the sense of interior unease.

Domestic motifs recur across series: half-eaten meals, unmade beds, bathroom mirrors, and potted plants become anchors for feelings of fatigue, anxiety, and fleeting contentment. In still lifes, a single mug or bouquet may sit on a table alongside a phone or open laptop, aligning Levinthal’s work with a longer history of domestic painting while firmly situating it in the present. Her recurring female figures, often dark-haired and tied in a topknot, move between introspective solitude and scenes of care, such as tending children or sharing a meal, suggesting a shifting, divided self.

A work like Bed (April) (2020), painted during the Covid-19 pandemic and included in the ICA Boston exhibition A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now (March–September 2022), exemplifies how Levinthal turns the bedroom into a site of both refuge and restlessness. The painting focuses on a rumpled bed and a figure caught between waking and sleeping, using close cropping and subdued colour to evoke the suspended time and psychological strain of lockdown. Across other recent exhibitions such as Tourist at M+B in Los Angeles (2023), Some Day at Ingleby in Edinburgh (2022), and Neighbors, Strangers, Gazers, Bathers at Monya Rowe in New York (2022), she has expanded this language into scenes of travel, public space, and observation, while retaining the same close attention to mood and gesture.

Themes and Context

Levinthal’s work is often described as chronicling the quotidian, but its real focus lies in the psychological undercurrents of contemporary life: exhaustion, distraction, care, and the pressure to stay composed. Her paintings address the modern human condition through small moments—waiting rooms, commutes, evenings at home—that reveal how private anxieties play out within shared spaces.

She engages closely with the history of figurative painting, drawing inspiration from artists such as Alice Neel, Romare Bearden, and David Hockney, while reworking their lessons into a language attuned to current social and emotional realities. Flattened perspectives and cropped compositions echo modernist strategies, yet her subdued palette and emphasis on repetition of daily routines give the paintings a distinctly contemporary atmosphere. In this way, Levinthal’s practice sits within a wider resurgence of figurative painting that explores interiority, mental health, and domestic life, especially from a female perspective.

Exhibitions and Recognition

Levinthal’s work has gained increasing international visibility through solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and beyond. Recent solo presentations include Spotlight: Aubrey Levinthal at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (8 February–11 March 2023), and Some Day at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (2023), alongside earlier exhibitions such as Tourist at M+B, Los Angeles (2021); Neighbors, Strangers, Gazers, Bathers at Monya Rowe Gallery, New York (2022); and House Weary at Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin (16 February–26 March 2022).

In 2026, Ingleby is presenting a series of monotypes by Aubrey Levinthal in collaboration with David Zwirner, published by Utopia Editions, underscoring the expanding reach of her work across gallery contexts and printmaking platforms. Her paintings have also been included in notable group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum MORE in Gorssel, the Netherlands; the Xiao Museum in Rizhao, China; and the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, among others. Coverage in publications such as Artforum, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, Artnet, Maake Magazine, and Forbes has further cemented Levinthal’s position within contemporary figurative painting discourse.

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Ocula | 2026