Esther Levigne (b. 1973, Barcelona) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, and embroidery. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht and has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in the exploration of the human body and its symbolic, emotional, and cultural tensions.

Levigne’s work navigates the intersections of religion, tradition, violence, eroticism, and beauty. Through the layering of disparate materials and imagery, she constructs compositions in which dissonant elements—sacred and carnal, delicate and violent—coexist. These contrasts give rise to a charged visual field where intimacy becomes monumental, and beauty takes on an unsettling, almost confrontational presence.

Her paintings are built through a process of accumulation and excavation. Semi-transparent layers of pencil, paint, spray, collage, and embroidery conceal and reveal one another, forming fragmented narratives that invite close and sustained attention. Cuts made directly into the varnished surface expose hidden strata beneath, evoking both physical incision and psychological rupture. Within these works, bodies are sites of transformation: organs become thoughts, tissues dissolve into dreams, and desire manifests through symbolic forms such as flowers, patterns, and fluid elements.

Drawing on visual echoes of Christian iconography, Levigne’s figures often inhabit a space of internal conflict, marked by wounds, gestures, and traces of violence that speak to the human pursuit of perfection and the fragility underlying it. Her practice ultimately constructs a complex, dreamlike universe—at once seductive and disquieting—where the boundaries between fantasy and reality, control and surrender, are continually negotiated. Being of Spanish and Dutch ancestry, Esther is trilingual as a Spanish, Dutch, and English speaker.