Anna Leonhardt Exhibition

Marc Straus

[Image: Anna Leonhardt "Body Landscape" (2019) Oil on linen, 71.5 x 52 in.]

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MARC STRAUS presents new paintings by Anna Leonhardt (b. 1981, Germany) in her third solo show with the gallery. Leonhardt’s paintings are worlds within themselves and each one unveils a facet of her life.

Broader dispositions are captured in the numerous painted layers that comprise the backgrounds, which accumulate over time. Layers of colors are combined and built up, scraped on, mixed, concealed, exposed again. Leonhardt applies a dozen or more layers on each piece, that completely sprawl over the canvas. Over time elements, at times discordant, combine to finalize her composition. The monochrome color gradients take the viewer in search of a horizon line or for a potential landscape that never fully reveals itself. She places more quickly executed horizontal and vertical elements in the background. Then complex, thickly textured bands of color, almost sculptural, stand out from the ground and interwoven. Leonhardt’s canvases vibrate restlessly, patches humming within their designated compositional placement. Leonhardt has become increasingly engaged with philosophy on aspects of light in artworks. She is in pursuit of the impossible task of capturing light and air in heavy, dense oil paints. In a sense they become beautiful failures, but ultimately new and vibrant and autobiographical.

Her paintings could be alternately read as personages, or perhaps calligraphy – a text in an unknowable language, or neither. Leonhardt’s paintings are powerful and emotive while they depict states of silence, movement, color and form. They are a lifeline and as such, they breathe in; they breathe out.

There are echoes of Miró and more recently, Scully’s segmentations with frayed borders, which are a departure from the previous work. The sensuousness of her new paintings certainly recalls the works of Rothko.

Leonhardt studied painting under Professor Ralf Kerbach in Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, a school renowned for its highly technical and formal academia. Leonhardt has exhibited in Dresden, Berlin and Leipzig, Brussles, Madrid, Mexico City, Miami, and more. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kunstsammlung des Sächsischen Landtages, art collection of the Saxon Parliament and Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden. She has an upcoming exhibition at the German Consulate General New York entitled What is Real? opening January 15, 2020.