Lorena Levi, an artist whose portraits painted on wood gained her fast-growing momentum in the UK, died on January 8 at 29. Her death was announced this week via her Instagram, which said she had battled pancreatic cancer.
Levi rose quickly over the past few years, staging a show in Milan with M+B, a well-regarded gallery based in Los Angeles, and taking part in the V.O. Curations program, which has offered artists ranging from Emma Prempeh to Cajsa von Zeipel studio spaces in London. Shortly before it closed, in 2023, Marlborough Gallery added her to its roster; the British government owns her work in its national collection.
She was known for paintings of everyday people that she called “narrative portraiture” for the way that it captured a “snippet of a scene that holds a narrative.” Citing Paula Rego, Alice Neel, Frida Kahlo, and Chantal Joffe as her inspirations, she sought to envision “different emotions or stances within a context of a scene,” as she put it.
The artist often painted directly onto wood, leaving its unvarnished grain visible to the viewer. “I found that on a wood background the painting flattened, making the composition almost dreamscape-like and distorting perspective—as it is never fully clear how close, or far, the figures are to elements of the space they inhabit,” she said in an interview.
Levi was born in Istanbul in 1997 and lived with her family in Tel Aviv until she was three. Her family then relocated again to the UK, where she remained for much of her career. She was born with cystic fibrosis because of a bowel obstruction and turned early on to art as “a creative outlet so I could express my emotions” and avoid “sinking into boredom and depression,” she said last year.
She received an art foundation at Art & Guilds in London, then attended a masters program at the Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 2021. Solo shows followed with galleries such as the Alchemy Experiment in Glasgow and Mama and Paul Stolper, both in London.
Though her portraits often seemed analog in style, they were sometimes rooted in the digital world. For one series, she interviewed Redditors who frequented r/IncelExit, then used their testimony for paintings that explore how men look at women. One such work features a magazine with a nude woman lain on the floor beside a pair of sneakered feet.
Lorena Levi, Everyone’s Staring, 2022.
Courtesy the artist
Other works contended with her treatments for cystic fibrosis and pancreatic cancer, both of which she frequently talked about in interviews. A show held last year at Incubator gallery featured paintings of Barbies. Rather than painting these dolls with idealized, plasticky bodies, Levi represented them as imperfect and fleshy in reflection of her own experience of her illnesses.
The Incubator show also featured two self-portraits, one done in 2019, the other executed in 2025 while she was undergoing chemotherapy. The 2019 one features a mostly nude body that is scarred, its face concealed beneath swirls of red. The 2025 one shows Levi’s gaunt head more clearly, looking out of the canvas and into the black void all around her.
