Leah, sitting

"These are oil paintings, medium and large, in which the artist illustrates her experiences, tensions and abandonment, joys and backstage psychodramas. With a decidedly photographic composition, she takes the legs of fashion show habitués the crush of photographers, waiting to shoot, a flurry of activity, their flash on the catwalk, the advance of a cloud of pallid models, pale and evanescent like the creatures in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe." Viana Conti, courtesy c|e contemporary gallery, Milan

Hella Kalkus studied at the University of the Arts in Bremen in the field of Fashion Design. For more than twenty years she worked as a fashion journalist, first in Hamburg and then in Milan where she continued her studies at the Brera Academy of Arts and in several painting workshops in Piedmont and Tuscany. Recently she moved to Menton in the south of France, where she discovered her love for botanics and landscape. After focussing for many years on the perception of beauty in fashion and glossy magazines and at the same time aspiring to a more timeless and silent aesthetic, she continues her journey to the mediterranean, without loosing depth in the lightness of touch."For me, painting is not a way to find answers, but a way to continue asking questions. Staying curious, without presuming to know, can change perspective and help keeping the adventure of travel alive. Canvas is for me this place without borders where one can explore the surface and the depths of oneself, intimacy and the outside world, dreams and reality."

Leah, sitting

€790