ABOUT

Lavinia de Rothschild is an art historian and artist working in painting, staged photography and writing. Her work looks at the distance between how we appear and what we feel: how identity is assembled, how love changes the person who holds it, and how an image can carry what language cannot.

Her training as an art historian keeps her in close conversation with the painting of the past. Literature and music shape the work as much as images do, lending it rhythm, symbolism and a sense of memory. Beauty, for her, is not a finish but an invitation to look longer, until the uncertainty and vulnerability inside a picture come into view.

In the Butterflies paintings, the butterfly stands for transformation and for time running out. Love and loss appear as forces that remake us, and each canvas becomes a place where tenderness, grief and renewal can sit side by side.

The photographic series Posthuman approaches identity through bodies, masks and deliberately arranged objects. Every scene is physically built in front of the camera, with no AI or digital manipulation. By hiding the face, the photographs ask what makes a person recognisable, and how much of the self lies beyond what can be seen.

Her writing runs parallel to the visual work, returning to unconditional love, absence and the connections that outlast them. Across every medium she asks the viewer for the same thing: to stay with an image past the first impression, and to leave with something slightly altered.