Marc Straus

A red evening sky, the body language of daily commuters, the glow of lights from a neighbor’s house – Anna Leonhardt synthesizes life’s endless stimuli in her abstract work. Malevich said that a painted surface is a real living form, here in sheer vitality Leonhardt activates her paintings with numerous layers of thick oil paint. Every inch of the luscious surface is carefully attended to, resulting in a two-fold enthrallment, that of color and materiality.

Most distinct are vertical and horizontal forms Leonhardt affectionately calls “Raumzeug” (“Space Stuff”). Rightfully so, they are the very life-force of her paintings. Always in exuberant impasto, these multi-layered marks may seem to float freely but they are in constant interaction, epitomizing Leonhardt’s innate grasp for rhythm and balance.

Preferring the palette knife, with each drag Leonhardt welcomes accidents and consequences, building up complex compositions intuitively as much as empirically. Colors are the star performers on her operatic stage, they bleed and blend right up to the edges of the canvas. Luminous and mystic, her paintings are lucid metaphors of the physical world.

Anna Leonhardt (b. 1981 Pforzheim, Germany) studied painting under Professor Ralf Kerbach in Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, a school renowned for its highly technical and formal academia. Leonhardt has shown in Dresden, Berlin and Leipzig and 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.

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