Rising British Painter Dies at 29 Amid Cancer Battle

Lorena Levi, an artist whose wood portraits gained rapid momentum in Britain, died on January 8 at the age of 29. Her death was announced this week on Instagram, where she said she had pancreatic cancer.

Levi has risen rapidly over the past few years, having an exhibition in Milan with renowned Los Angeles gallery M+B and participating in the VO Curations program, which provides London studio space to artists ranging from Emma Prempeh to Cajsa von Zeipel. She was added to the Marlborough Gallery’s roster in 2023, shortly before its closure; the British government made her work a national collection.

She is best known for her paintings of people in everyday life, which she calls “narrative portraiture” because it captures “narrative fragments of a scene.” She cited Paula Rego, Alice Neel, Frida Kahlo and Chantal Joffe as inspirations, trying to imagine “different emotions or positions within the context of the scene,” as she puts it.

Artists often paint directly onto the wood, allowing the viewer to see the unpainted grain. “I found that, on the wooden background, the painting flattened out, making the composition almost dream-like and distorting the perspective—because it was never entirely clear how close or far away the figures were from the elements of space they inhabited,” she said in an interview.

Levi was born in Istanbul in 1997 and lived with his family in Tel Aviv when he was three years old. Her family subsequently moved again to England, where she remained for most of her career. She said last year that she was born with cystic fibrosis due to an intestinal blockage and came into art early as “a creative outlet so I could express my emotions” and avoid “falling into boredom and depression.”

She gained an art foundation at Art & Guilds, London, before studying for an MA at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 2021. Subsequently, she had solo exhibitions at Alchemy Experiment Gallery in Glasgow and Mama and Paul Stolper Gallery in London.

Although her portraits often appear stylistically similar, they are sometimes rooted in the digital world. In a series, she interviewed Reddit users who frequented r/IncelExit and then used their testimonies to create paintings that explored how men view women. One of the pieces features a magazine with a naked woman lying on the floor with a pair of sneakers next to her.

Other pieces debate her treatment of cystic fibrosis and pancreatic cancer, both of which she frequently talks about in interviews. An exhibition at the Incubator Gallery last year featured Barbie’s paintings. Rather than depicting these dolls with idealized, malleable bodies, Levi depicts them as imperfect and fleshy to reflect her own experience with illness.

The Incubator exhibition also features two self-portraits, one completed in 2019 and the other in 2025 while she was undergoing chemotherapy. The 2019 work features a nearly naked body, scarred and with a face hidden beneath a swirl of red. The 2025 work more clearly shows Levi’s gaunt head, her gaze looking off the canvas into the black void around her.