Image: Manifold Editions, London
Manifold Editions is spotlighting Chris Levine’s ‘Light is Love’ (2025), a three-print series that marks the British artist’s first experiments with etching and the publisher’s first collaboration with him. The colour etchings carry imagery from Levine’s light work into a new medium, with shuttered heart motifs that appear to move, their forms cut through by bright beams of light.
The works stem from Levine’s immersive light installations, particularly his blipverts: sculptural installations fitted with LED bulbs. As viewers look back and forth, the bulbs project a visual echo of an image in peripheral vision. For ‘Light is Love’, Levine photographed light images before developing etchings from those photographs.
The title originated, Levine has said, in a meditative realisation that “Light is in fact Love.” The phrase subsequently became the title of a series of light installations that project the word ‘love’ and its heart symbol into the viewer’s peripheral vision.
Each edition is made by layering multiple etching plates, then hand-colouring the resulting print with densely pigmented inks. Pink, yellow, purple and blue make up the stated palette, bringing vivid colour to the three works: ‘Light is Love (i)’, ‘Light is Love (ii)’ and ‘Light is Love (iii)’.
Born in 1960, Levine works across installation, photography, performance, fashion, music and design, and is known for his work with light and lasers. His earlier ‘Lightness of Being’ (2004) is a holographic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
