Anna Leonhardt: Resonance
Marc Straus Gallery is pleased to present Resonance, a solo exhibition by Anna Leonhardt presenting a new body of work, on view from July 10 at the gallery's Tribeca location at 57 Walker Street. This marks the artist's fifth solo presentation with the gallery in New York.
The title, Resonance, emerges from a place of freedom and emotional strength. Leonhardt's paintings are rooted in a sustained inquiry into space, our relationship to it, and the way paint can make that relationship visible. Through a rigorous, almost mathematical juxtaposition of color, form, and scale, four colors, four corners, large against small, vertical figures rising from a horizontal ground, she constructs images in which balance is not imposed but detonated from within. The result is work that feels simultaneously atmospheric and alive.
There is a deliberate contradiction at the heart of these paintings. They are weighty, built through accumulation and physical effort, and yet the forms within them seem to dance. It is a tension Leonhardt does not resolve so much as inhabit, finding in it the very source of the work's emotional force. In PETSY (2026), four forms, yellow, blue, pink, and silver, float against a field that moves through pink, grey, and warm amber. The silver form introduces a note of unexpected luminosity; the yellow, vibrant and assertive, anchors the upper register with quiet authority. Together they hold a conversation that feels both precise and unresolved.
Working primarily with palette knives of all sizes, Leonhardt's process is driven by a central question she returns to consistently: what do I see, and how do I transform it through paint? Color is explored in its full range; the organization of material on the canvas is carefully considered, built up in layers that accumulate history and intention. When a work calls for reconsideration, Leonhardt sands it down and begins again, the surface becoming a record of the process itself, each layer informing the next. Nowhere is this clearer than in LB 19 (2026), the smallest work in the exhibition. Two forms, one moving from warm yellow into cool blue, the other from white through yellow into a soft lavender, sit within a pale, shifting field of grey-blue and peach. The surface carries the full evidence of its making: built up, scraped back, and rebuilt, its edges ragged with accumulated paint and its margins scattered with the flecks and threads left behind. At this intimate scale, nothing about the making is hidden.
The resulting surfaces are extraordinary in their density: thick, tactile expanses of oil paint whose luminous gradients belie the labor beneath them. The gradient functions as a kind of resolution, softening the tension between forms and lending the compositions their characteristic sense of balance. In TOEN (2026), this quality is felt with particular intimacy: two forms, one deep plum and one a smoldering amber, are held within a field of warm earth tones that shifts from rust to mauve. The closeness of the palette draws the eye inward; the forms press against one another with a quiet insistence, as if mid-sentence.
Leonhardt conceives of her paintings as abstract landscapes, the pictorial field organized horizontally while vertical forms rise through it, establishing rhythm, weight, and spatial presence. In this, her work belongs to a distinctly European, and specifically German, current of abstraction, one in which paint is treated as a physical substance to be dragged, scraped, and reworked, and in which abstraction never fully severs its ties to landscape and atmosphere. It is a sensibility shaped by her formal training under Professor Ralf Kerbach at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, the same academy that trained Gerhard Richter, where technical rigor underwrites even the most intuitive gesture. Where an earlier generation of German painters made the worked surface itself a subject, Leonhardt extends that inheritance into color: over time, color came to occupy a more central and assertive role in her work, extending to the edges of the canvas and fully claiming its place within the composition.
Every color in Leonhardt's work has its own territory. The forms she calls Raumzeug, "Space Stuff", are the animating presence of the paintings: impastoed, layered marks that float and anchor simultaneously, always in dialogue, always in motion. It is this quality, the coexistence of weight and lightness, of tension and grace, of contradiction held in equilibrium, that *Resonance* makes its subject.
Anna Leonhardt (b. 1981, Pforzheim, Germany) lives and works between New York and Berlin. 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.
