Anna Leonhardt

Anna Leonhardt (b. 1981, Pforzheim, Germany) lives and works between New York and Berlin. Her paintings begin with a landscape: a soft, atmospheric field of oil paint that shifts from one color into the next like light moving across a horizon. Against that ground she places her characters—a handful of upright, rounded forms, built up thick with a palette knife, that stand within the space like figures in a scene.

That contrast is the heart of the work. The landscape is smooth and hazy; the characters are dense and physical, troweled on in heavy impasto that catches the light and holds the mark of the knife. Leonhardt works largely by intuition, welcoming the accidents that arrive with each drag of the blade. Color bleeds past the forms and runs to the very edge of the canvas—and then beyond it, pushing past the painted surface so that the picture's hard border dissolves into a new, suspended edge made of color itself.

Her instinctive, experimental approach is grounded in rigorous training. Leonhardt completed her post-graduate studies under Professor Ralf Kerbach at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, an institution known for its highly technical academic tradition.

Her work has been exhibited widely across Europe and the United States, including solo exhibitions at Galerie Friese in Berlin and a long-standing relationship with MARC STRAUS in New York. Her paintings are held in public collections including the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Kunstfonds Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kunstsammlung des Sächsischen Landtages, and the Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden, alongside numerous private collections internationally.