Chris Levine

Chris Levine – Light connects science and spirituality

Chris Levine was born in 1960 to a Scottish mother and an English father in Ontario, Canada, and went on to attend the Saint Martin’s School of Art in London in the 1980s. His earliest career wish was that of astronaut and he developed a keen interest in the intricate coordinate system of timeless space, individual spirituality and objective science. With this background, he became interested in astronomy, to which he found a metaphorical approach. Chris Levine discovered light as a guide and connective link with which he simultaneously creates and illuminates his artistic spaces. Light functions both as a physical and symbolic quantity, affecting the immediately visible outer form as much as the hidden metaphorical symbolic levels. It is just this intrinsic ambivalence of light that Chris Levine values in his preferred tools and materials. Light gives the artist the possibility to bring the stars - which he has been observing since early childhood - down to earth among the people. 

Levine’s most famous work came about by accident

Chris Levine can thank his worldwide profile to one work in particular: a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II captured in a state of inner contemplation with eyes closed. Christened Her Majesty by the artist, the picture arose unplanned during a shooting of a special portrait in 2004 to celebrate the 800 years of membership of the Island of Jersey to the British Empire. A hologram had been planned for which the queen would be photographed in several stages. During the breaks between each shot, the queen relaxed with her eyes closed. Chris Levine was so taken with this perspective that he decided to take a further image. This second, accidental portrait of the queen, depicting probably the most public figure in the world in an unexpectedly intimate and private way, quickly gained worldwide fame and became a sought-after object of fans and collectors. 

A worldwide celebrated artist and sought-after partner

Chris Levine has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most important light artists. Not only the audience, but many other artists also seek to work with the innovative Brit, including Kate Moss, Grace Jones, Philip Tracey, Massive Attack, Anthony and the Johnsons, and Charlotte Tilbury. He has a long-term collaboration with the Eden Project, a popular attraction in Cornwall which presents numerous plants from various climate zones; Levine has conferred this new paradise with an unmistakeable artistic signature. Tadao Ando is one of the artists that Levine himself admires, praising his Church of the Light as a prime example of unadulterated minimalism. Levine uses the latest technology to realise his creative goals, accessing digital image processing, 3D scanners and laser beams. But behind the impressive high-tech stands the analogue idea, the dream of an artist who still loves to spend the night in his garden at full moon, gazing longingly up at the distant stars that fascinated him as a child.