MARC STRAUS is proud to present the inaugural solo exhibition of German artist Anna Leonhardt featuring new paintings created in New York during her three month residency.
The curl of a smile, a blurred view from a moving vehicle, the stimulus of an urban city, Anna Leonhardt synthesizes her experiences of life on her canvases. Malevich said that a painted surface is a real living form. Here Leonhardt activates her picture planes with sheer vitality. With the decisiveness of a marksman, she trowels oil paint to existence, defining forms that are at times stubby vertical trunks or limber acrobatic shapes, but always exuberant impasto. They possess subtle modulation and variety, epitomizing Leonhardt’s innate grasp for rhythm and balance.
She affectionately calls these her “Raumzeug” or “Space Stuff”, rightfully so, these non-representational masses are the very life-force of her paintings. The viewer perceives the physicality of the material, relishing its succulence. While quasi random in appearance, Leonhardt religiously investigates myriad combinations of interlocking patterns on preparatory sketches to ready herself for the next gestural attack.
With each drag of the palette knife, she welcomes all accidents and consequences, building up each layer intuitively as much as empirically. As a result, her compositions offer subliminal suggestions of things or even places; as landscapes they acknowledge Nicolas de Staël, as shapes Hans Hofmann. They too suggest glyphs, an esoteric syntax that documents the artist’s relationship with the physical world.
Colors are the star performers on her operatic stage, vocalizing in vibrant staccato. Leonhardt’s gradient chromatic sweeps have the fervor of a deep autumnal shade or the bleakness of a Dystopian future. No one color ever lived outside her paintings: they breed through chance encounters. Paints bleed and blend, suffusing the surface with new hues that glide right up to the edges of the canvas. Pores organically appear as she manipulates dense layers paint, revealing traces of a palette before. Her paintings are luminous and mystic, containing the world in a concentrated form.
Under Professor Ralf Kerbach’s tutelage, Anna Leonhardt graduated from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, a school renowned for its highly technical and formal academia. Her paintings are a culmination of her penchant for life viewed through the lens of a formally trained painter and her strive towards absolute consistency in her mark-making, establishing Leonhardt as one of today’s most exciting abstract voices.
Anna Leonhardt (b. 1981) has shown in both numerous exhibits in Dresden, Berlin and Leipzig. Her work is in numerous important private and public collections including Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kunstsammlung des Sächsischen Landtages, art collection of the Saxon Parliament and Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden. This is her first show in New York.
