Tall, lissom female forms stretched over settees and bedsteads, gathering on street corners like ghosts, half-concealed behind flowers or mugs, or glimpsed in reflection in the corners of mirrors. This is the captivating, melancholy world of Aubrey Levinthal, a Philadelphia-based figurative painter currently enjoying her first UK-based show. The artist was featured in a recent exhibition at Ingleby documenting the influence of Pierre Bonnard on today’s crop of young painters. In fact, Levinthal’s work hums with the echoes of a whole swathe of art history, in which a figure as vibrant and sunny as Bonnard might seem somewhat on the periphery.

Throughout this sequence of works, there is a sense of bodies elongated and flattened in the mind’s eye. Groups of near-identical faces suggest a kind of expanded self-portraiture (the self fractured into multiple shards or aspects), while human bodies often seem to disintegrate into the highly compressed backgrounds. Levinthal’s flattened perspectives, like the hieratic rigidity of her bodies and affectless facial expressions, have a kind of ancientness to them, almost like Egyptian statuary. Yet these are also glimpses of everyday female life, in familiar domestic and urban surroundings. The spirit of Levinthal’s work lies in this marriage of the quotidian and the mysterious. 

Aubrey Levinthal: Mirror Matter, Ingleby, until Saturday 13 September; main picture: Neighboring States.