Anna Leonhardt: To Be One Is Always To Become With Many

We are pleased to present new paintings by Anna Leonhardt (b. 1981, Germany) in her fourth solo exhibition To Be One Is Always To Become With Many* with the gallery.

Thinking of painting as space rather than an object, Leonhardt distills her everyday life experiences, emotions, and impressions into painted compositions. Extending the dialogue that she has with the painting that she constructs, the core of her work becomes an exploration of what these painted spaces do to us – to her while she works on them and to the viewer who stands in front of the finished canvases. Feeling and expression manifest through the oil paint that she piles up with a palette knife on the canvas in multiple layers. The surfaces become an atmospheric space that the viewer is invited to inhabit.

With these works, Leonhardt turns to a deeper and richer color palette; light and space evoke the notion of nocturnal cityscapes. Hues of royal and steel blues, oily greens and teal, and metallic yellows. Reflection of neon signs and streetlights on a dark, rainy street or scenes from a movie come to mind amongst other associations. Synthesizing life’s endless stimuli in her abstract work, she continues to create exciting new pictorial spaces. Ultimately these are joyful, optimistic, life-affirming works.

Color and space have always been the center of her work and Leonhardt’s most recent explorations result in various new spacial arrangements. Some paintings display a background and foreground, following on previously established renderings, while others show a divided space, or a cluster of spaces/cells arranged in tighter compositions resulting in an array of formations ranging from lighter, airier to denser structures. The painterly surfaces are expressive and characteristically hers, the thickly applied layers of paint build up, spread, overlap, dissolve into each other and extend over the perimeters of the canvas with frayed edges.

We sense movement and vibration. The canvases pulsate with life and a third dimension comes into play: that of time. The paintings command attention simultaneously and create their own sense of time. The rhythm and time of each composition or space is different and requires the viewer to tune in, to slow down or to pick-up a more dynamic, stimulating tempo. The intrinsic rhythm of the painting informs the rhythm of observation and reflection.

Leonhardt studied painting under Professor Ralf Kerbach at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, a school renowned for its highly technical and formal academia. Her work has been exhibited in Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig and New York; and is in numerous private and public collections in Europe, the Americas, and in Asia, including the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Kunstsammlung des Sächsischen Landtages, as well as in the art collection of the Saxon Parliament and Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden among others.

*quote from Donna J. Haraway: When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, 2008