THE SIT DOWN
03: LORENA LEVI
It’s hard to trace a straight line in Lorena Levi’s practice. From someone who doubted whether she could make a living from being an artist, to now: solo shows, major prizes, and a deeply original body of work that takes the private and turns it inside out.
Following a foundation year at City & Guilds, she moved to study Fine Art and History of Art at the University Edinburgh. That mix — the making and the contextualising — continues to shape her practice now. “I liked the independence of the course,” she says, “it gave me space to follow what I was actually interested in.” That independence also led to a crucial thread in her work: finding moments of humour or intimacy within difficult subject matter.
Her early works dealt with health and personal histories — made tangible through a series of small, disarming portraits of people on the toilet. “Giving context aids the work,” she says, and these paintings became tiny psychological studies: downward gazes, distracted stares, the flicker of privacy made public.
Lorena's influences include Paula Rego, Alice Neel and Marlene Dumas — artists concerned with the body, the interior, the quietly haunting. But her subjects have shifted over time. These days, she often paints people she hasn’t met. During lockdown, she turned to Omegle, having pseudo-therapy conversations with strangers across the world: stories of families, futures, regrets. Their faces weren’t what stuck — it was their voices, their truths. The resulting works are imagined figures: soft, dream-like composites of intimacy, detachment, and fleeting connection.
In 2023, she embarked on a more investigative body of work — a project focused on the incel subculture, sparked by conversations she had through a Reddit account co-run with her then-boyfriend, an investigative journalist. She spoke with self-proclaimed incels — some trying to escape, others lost in loops of self-loathing — and built scenes from their testimonies. The work is confronting, strange, and steeped in the tragic loneliness that runs through her wider practice.
Though born in Istanbul, Lorena has spent nearly all of her life in London — and that dual sense of belonging and distance creeps into her work. Her portraits are no longer direct depictions; they’re reflections, echoes, constructed from fragments of stories, sometimes barely visible beneath the surface of the wood she paints on.
In 2022, she was selected for New Contemporaries and won the Jackson’s Art Prize. A solo show was due to take place at Marlborough Gallery in May 2024, but the gallery closed suddenly just weeks before. The body of work, originally intended for that space, now sits in her studio — a number large pieces, each one intensely personal, and waiting for the right moment, and place, to be seen.
If Lorena’s practice has taught us anything, it’s that even in transience, in the in-between spaces, something lasting can emerge.