We are thrilled to announce that the winner of Jackson’s Painting Prize 2022 is London based artist Lorena Levi. Her oil on MDF work, ‘January Assessment’ was selected out of 8949 entries and she has won the £6000 cash prize. We look forward to sharing more of Lorena’s work, inspirations and creative processes.
January Assesment, 2022
Lorena Levi
Oil on MDF, 100 x 90 cm | 39.3 x 35.4 in
Lorena’s Artist Statement
This is a current project Lorena has been working on where she has been finding psychoanalysis academic papers online and painting scenes from what she reads about. This painting is based off a child ‘Eric’ who has gone to psychoanalysis for a few years and each year, has four assessments with his parents and the therapist. Lorena wanted to try and depict the tension between family by placing them in the therapy room – a place that is becoming more and more familiar by people no longer stigmatising or hiding treatment for mental health. This series grew after her painting ‘couples therapy, if’ which was an imagined depiction of her parents in a couples therapy scene. Lorena has drawn inspiration from portrait artists such as Alice Neel, Chantal Joffe and early Lucian Freud who all capture internal psychology of the subjects they choose to paint, specifically in the eyes.
Lorena Levi in her studio
Lorena Levi is a narrative portraiture painter. Her practice is research based where she uses the internet, speaking to strangers on chatroom sites and listening to podcasts with real people to gain stories for paintings. Lorena has been collaging found images with her own to create compositions which display an imagined narrative, telling a story in a snapshot.
Living with Cystic Fibrosis, Lorena has also explored her relationship between mind and body. The grapple between a seemingly healthy body on the outside and the psychology relating to the reality of an ‘unwell’ body is a major theme in some of Lorena’s work.
Graduating from Edinburgh University with an MA in Fine art 2021, Lorena now works in V.O curations, is part of the Alveston Fine art collection and exhibits at spaces such as Mall Galleries, Fitzrovia Gallery and will be showing at the RSA New Contemporaries 2023. She has been granted two upcoming solo shows in London and Glasgow later in 2022 and was given the Astaire Prize at the end of her course in Edinburgh.
About the Author
