Artist: Benjamin Levy

LBF presents Keeping Up With The Corbies, a solo exhibition by London-based artist Benjamin Levy.

In a series of ten new paintings, Levy offers an incisive examination of class and image-making in Britain today. Interested in the relentless carousel of digital images on screens and its impact on working-class material aspirations and sense of self, Levy’s subject is the society of spectacle in which we all now live. Principally composed in a series of large-format diptychs, Levy pairs hues of shared colour, weighted gestures, or arcing contours to examine our habits of looking–not only at the objects we desire and which we feel we need to overcome our status anxieties, but how we look at the people we love. Levy gets hold of the algorithms and advert-driven content of social media in the way that James Rosenquist took the mid-century billboard, blurring the distinctions between high art and the ‘new media’ of proliferating visual representations in the consumer society of his own time. But beyond his forensic attention to glossy performance, what is most enthralling about Levy’s realist pictures is his staging of intimacy and loneliness, camaraderie and isolation, in which we must all ask what price we pay for our obsession with luxury and the fetishisation of objects.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an essay by London-based academic and writer Matthew Holman.

Benjamin Levy (b. 1982, London, UK) is an artist from North London. Producing evocative paintings that sensitively examine class in Britain, Levy explores themes of working-class life, status anxiety, and the sacrifices made in the pursuit of social mobility. Largely self-taught, Levy’s formal education was fleeting. After completing an Art Foundation course at Barnet College and briefly studying Illustration at Middlesex University, he left academia, when, as he puts it, ‘life became a bit more serious’. With bills to pay, Levy spent most of his twenties juggling various jobs – working as a gas engineer, carpet fitter, loft converter, labourer on building sites, and manning the tills at Sainsbury’s – all whilst maintaining a steadfast dedication to drawing and painting. As he entered his thirties, the physical and psychological toll of his engineering work propelled him to commit to his art practice full-time. Highlights of recent solo exhibitions include ‘The Milky Bar Kid Was Strong and Tough,’ The Artist Room, London (2023); ‘Icons of War,’ Castle Fitzjohns Gallery - Scope Art Fair, Miami (2019); ‘Politically Incorrect,’ Macaya Gallery, Miami (2018); ‘I’m NOT Lovin It,’ Macaya Gallery, Miami (2017).