Darren Knight Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by New Zealand artist Saskia Leek. Leek builds her paintings over a long period of time, regarding them as complex objects akin to books or songs. She revisits subjects and motifs, accumulating an idiosyncratic and highly personal visual language. The domestic scale of the paintings is matched by a deceptively unassuming iconography of pets, houses, still life and landscape but the end results are objects with remarkable presence.

Leek’s new paintings retain recognisable elements from these origins but have become more formal in their concerns. Subjects are monumentalised and abstracted and colour is employed in eye-popping combinations. The painted image blasts out of the picture surface and onto the frame, appearing free itself from its very support.

I think the new paintings embody a kind of desperate search but with no fixed intention or logic. They search for a point of pictorial rightness but without an expectation of what that might be. 
– Saskia Leek

In 2013, Leek was the subject of a survey exhibition, Saskia Leek: Desk Collection, held at the Dowse Art Museum, Wellington and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand. Other recent solo exhibitions include Casual Arrangements, Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (2014); The Colour Course, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand; Peace Leaves, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (both 2013); Fruit Subjects, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand; The Berlin Years, (with Isobel Thom), Hamish Mckay Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (both 2012); A Modern Menu, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2011) and Yellow is the Putty of the World, The Walters Prize, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2010). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Better Places, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2008); A spoonful weighs a ton, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne (2006-2007) and Matrix 213: Some Forgotten Place, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, USA (2004). 

Leek’s work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; Museum of New Zealand - Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand; Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand. This is Saskia Leek’s fifth solo exhibition with Darren Knight Gallery.

*image (left)
Saskia Leek,
Untitled, 2014,
oil and gesso on aluminium board, 44 x 52cm
courtesy of the artist and Darren Knight Gallery