(PERSPEKTIVE.hoch3 | Artist Presentation | 11.11.2010 | Galerie Offenes Atelier D.U.Design A-9500 Villach, Austria)

Priska Leutenegger was born in 1975 in Uster, Switzerland and currently lives and works in Freienstein / Canton of Zurich. Art has been an indispensable part of her life since 2000. She acquired the basic tools for her future artistic development through a correspondence course at the Zurich Art School. She had her first public exhibition in 2003 and has since been a successful and constant artistic presence in German-speaking countries.

Priska Leutenegger's initial impulse to pursue the visual arts was an emerging, new point of view, the discovery of a different way of looking at things, people, life itself. Indeed, these building blocks form the visible foundation of Priska Leutenegger's work. In a tense game between clear forms and an almost organic sculptural method, she articulates deep intensity and joy in her work and masters the challenge of the visualization of power in both body and spirit. She builds her images in up to six layers with paint, sizing, pigments, sand, crayon and chalk. In the creation process she purposely tolerates a certain lack of control inherent in the materials, even to use this potential for her purpose of rendering conscious the murky grey of the subconscious.

"I have an intense fascination for material which completely consumes me when I am working," she says about how she experiences her creative process, the result of which is an almost physically perceptible vitality in her image-objects, in spite of their formal rigor. “Fundamente”, “Emerging from Depth” and “Walks Outside” – through these three series, Priska Leutenegger gives us an insight into her work in the field of mixed-media painting. The colorful, intuitively accentuated three-dimensionality of her work creates a captivating expression of depth and growth, becoming a pictorial testimony of powerful naturalness and energy.

This complex three-dimensionality is also what led Priska Leutenegger to her new passion, photography. In her photographic work she strives just as much for a fresh look into deeper levels and follows her own, very personal character trait of seeking the fundamental nature of a thing, a picture or an object.

But for now let us focus on how her painting relicts affect us, both online and in person. Priska Leutenegger's photo work will receive its due on another occasion.

"With every work that passes through my hands, I feel enrichment in my life," she confides. Let us understand this as a summons and let our lives be enriched through the discovery of her art!

 
Barbara Rapp, November 2010
www.barbara-rapp.com