Aubrey Levinthal is a painter living and working in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. The city is important to her, she was born there in 1986, 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. Now in her thirties she has continued to make the city her home, and something of its light and colour has seeped into the scumbled greys that distinguish the muted, often melancholy tones of her palette.
Her paintings, of (often autobiographical) characters going about their daily lives in downtown Philadelphia, have an unusual combination of intimacy and openness that owes something to the likes of Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse and Milton Avery, yet they are resolutely contemporary in character and belong unequivocally to the time and place in which they are made. As Jennifer Higgie has noted, “Despite the ordinary situations she describes, Levinthal’s paintings imply that drama is less interesting, less potent, than the fleeting minutes and hours of our days. The artist finds a magical balance of the monumental and the delicate.”
Recently the critic John Yau has also described Levinthal 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.”
Her work has been shown extensively in the USA, including the ICA, Boston, in A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, and at the Flag Art Foundation, New York. Recent paintings have also been presented in group shows in the UK and Europe, including Ingleby’s Wings of a Butterfly, A Closer Look at Havercampf Leistenschneider and Licked by the Waves at Museum MORE, Gorssel in 2024.
Ingleby currently presents Mirror Matter, Levinthal's first major solo presentation in the UK at Ingleby over the Edinburgh Art Festival, from 28 June - 13 September 2025. The show includes a new series of monotypes, published by David Zwirner’s Utopia Editions, and is accompanied by a 232-page monograph, published by Ingleby, devoted to her work over the past decade, with texts by Jennifer Higgie and Hettie Judah.