Anna Ley paints what she sees and how she sees it. Reducing the motifs she chooses to the most necessary. The question arising when creating a picture is: How much does the picture need and what doesn’t it need? Ley’s paintings show everyday objects and places that have shaped the painter‘s life. But they also belong to our society’s collective memory. Thus the viewer has the possibility to link their own experiences and memories with the respective painting. If one zooms out of the individual picture, a network of pictures emerges; a hyper image reflecting the painter’s personal attitude and preferences while also raising current social and political questions.

Anna Ley, born in 1990 in Troisdorf, Germany, studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg. Her paintings often show everyday objects and scenes that are familiar to most people – dalmatians, petrol pumps, flip-flops. Far from any photorealistic precision, she abstracts and reduces the pictorial figures and removes them from their actual contexts. Logos, emblems and other iconographic signs, which almost everyone knows how to decipher, stand for a recognizable zeitgeist that has inscribed itself in the collective memory.

ADLER EHRENSTEIN LEY