Saskia Leek: Desk Collection

18 October – 14 December 2013

Desk Collection featured sixty works produced by Saskia Leek from 1994-2012, drawn from New Zealand and Australian public and private collections. The title of the show stakes a claim for art that is intimate, hinting at the modest scale of Leek’s paintings and the fact that almost every one of them could have been produced at a desk. The exhibition traces Leek’s rise to prominence in 1995 with the exhibition Hangover which placed her in a new generation of artists whose work explored popular culture. Evolving from the personal, comic book nature of the early works, she moved on to test the possibilities and limits of the painted image. Curator Emma Bugden said, “At a time of ever larger and louder artworks, Dunedin-based artist Saskia Leek is known for the intimate quality of her paintings. There is a deep sense of familiarity in Leek’s pictures, connecting us to images we already know and presenting them anew; most of her works are created in response to existing artworks.”

Toured by the Dowse Art Museum.