Saskia Leek

Saskia Leek was born in 1970 in Christchurch, New Zealand. She currently lives and works in Auckland. 

She 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. Subjects are monumentalised and abstracted and colour is employed in eye-popping combinations.

She has regular solo shows in New Zealand and Australia and a solo show with, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Fransisco, USA (2008), Her work has been included in group exhibitions including Undreamed of…50 years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2016); Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show, Auckland Art Gallery Auckland, New Zealand; 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).

Saskia Leek’s work is held in the collections of Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Te Papa, Wellington, and other New Zealand public collections.