Leah Durner is an American artist known for her painting that embody strong emotions, translated through the strong colors and swirls of paint. The colors are vibrant, the mood is refreshing yet very emotional, you can’t ignore their beauty. When I cam across her collection, I couldn’t but keep staring, the way the colors are intertwined yet not losing their color and identity is magnificent. I loved every single one of them. Enjoy the selection!
Leah Durner is an artist who lives and works in New York City. She has exhibited her art at Art Gotham, Barbara Ann Levy Gallery, Markham Murray Gallery, Steinbaum Kraus Gallery, Limbo, CBs 313 Gallery, Coup de Grace Gallery, and SoHo Center for Visual Arts. The one-person exhibition, Leah Durner: Paintings, is scheduled for Fall 2005 at the galleries of the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut and Mount Berry College in Georgia. In 2001 she was an artist in residence at the Leighton Studios for Independent Residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She has also curated exhibitions, published art criticism, and lectured on a number of topics, including the American landscape, gestural abstraction and phenomenology, conceptualism and its sources, the work of the artist Dan Graham, and the composers Maryanne Amacher and John Cage. She received her B.A from Wake Forest University and her M.F.A. from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Statement
Generosity, beauty, and dirt are embodied in my paintings. The paintings embody generosity because each one is an open-handed gift to each person whether connoisseur or neophyte-who comes to it. The painting holds back nothing; the greater the viewer’s receptivity the greater the gift.
The paintings embody beauty, a quality both loved and hated-loved because it gives pleasure, and hated because it seems exempt from tribulation. Beauty does not stop to apologize for its apparent ease and lightness; it knows the exertion and care with which it was formed. To advertise the effort with which it was made or to apologize for its artifice would distort it. Beauty simply stands in itself.
Finally, the paintings physically embody dirt, the earth itself, which is a fundamental element of paint. The first pigments, extracted from the ground, were simply colored dirt (as Philip Guston called paint). Over 30,000 years ago, human beings painted with dirt on the walls of caves. We have since emerged from the caves, added new pigments to our supply of colors, and have never stopped painting since the first mark was made.
Contact info@leahdurner.com
Website www.leahdurner.com