Saskia Leek

The work of New Zealand artist  Saskia Leek consists of a hybrid of 1970-style abstraction (with its creamy, acid-toned color palette and cubist geometry) and the kitsch subject matter found in paint-by-number kits and the quotidian still-life canvases found stacked in dusty corners of thrift stores.  Leek fuses these impulses with her gauzy object renderings that sit slightly off-kilter and seem to question their own seriousness as proper subjects.

Leek’s small scale works created at Aurobora follow along the same terrain. Each composition retains a provocative ambiguity by the way Leek  recasts her subjects:  a mountain that looks like a bicuspid, flowers in a vase that look like a bouquet of splintered glass shards, a rising sun/ a sinking moon over the water that dissembles into an orb-like abstraction.  Saskia Leek’s work is recast over and over again highlighting the notion that something magical is derived out of the ordinary and the mythic is found in simple reenactments of the mundane.

AUROBORA PROJECT

May 2008

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

Te Papa, Wellington, New Zealand; Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand; Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand; Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, New Zealand