Chris Levine

Chris Levine was born in 1960. Press and gallery profiles typically describe him as British, while Artnet's artist database lists him as Canadian; both descriptions attach to the same artist and body of work, and available sources do not resolve the discrepancy. His birthplace and exact birth date are not documented in the sources reviewed. He lives and works in the United Kingdom.

His education is not documented in the available art world sources. No school, degree, or formal training is confirmed for him in gallery biographies, Wikipedia, or major auction house profiles.

Levine works across light and laser installation, photography, and performance, with a multidisciplinary practice that extends into fashion, music, and design. He is best known for a series of portraits of Queen Elizabeth II made using laser and holographic processes, chief among them Lightness of Being (2004) and Equanimity. Five of his works are held in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, including these two Queen Elizabeth II portraits, and the National Portrait Gallery has described Lightness of Being as the most evocative image of a royal by any artist.

Levine is represented and exhibited by Gazelli Art House in London, which maintains an artist page and has staged a dedicated viewing room of his work, and by The Drang Gallery, which has also exhibited and sold his work. In 2024, The Art Newspaper reported that his Queen Elizabeth II portraits were at the center of a multi-million-pound copyright dispute, which was reported to be in mediation at that time.

Levine's Queen Elizabeth II portraits have drawn the most sustained institutional attention of his career. The National Portrait Gallery has described Lightness of Being as the most evocative image of a royal by any artist, and the work sits alongside four other Levine pieces in the gallery's permanent collection. His broader practice, spanning laser installation and meditative light work, is generally framed by galleries and the press as bridging spiritual and technological registers, though independently sourced named critical commentary in major outlets is comparatively thin relative to the institutional recognition his portrait work has received.

Levine's auction record is Lightness of Being, which sold for GBP 187,500 (about USD 234,023) at Sotheby's London in April 2017, tripling its presale estimate and surpassing an earlier GBP 35,000 result for a smaller edition print of the same image. Public sale results for his work are limited in number, reflecting a market concentrated in a small number of high-value, essentially unique or small-edition images rather than a deep, continuously trading body of production.

Levine's market is thin and concentrated: a handful of iconic, often unique or small-edition images account for most of the meaningful auction activity, so a single result, like the 2017 Sotheby's sale, can dominate the record while other sales trade far lower. No catalogue raisonne has been published, so provenance and authentication depend on the artist's studio and his current gallery relationships, Gazelli Art House and The Drang Gallery. Because so much of his public profile rests on the Queen Elizabeth II series, collectors should distinguish between the market for that specific body of work and the broader, less liquid market for his laser and installation practice generally.