A Colour Has Many Layers
Liesbeth Piena (1993) makes powerful paintings in which plants and natural landscapes are reduced to essential forms. She looks at reality with an analytical eye, in which small details attract her attention. From her observations she isolates striking fragments and uses them to compose new images.
In A Colour Has Many Layers, Francis Nagy was inspired by Piena's fascination with nature for her short story 'Cloud Forests'. She describes how the I-character scrapes the earth from the soles of her father's shoes in order to evoke the scent of trees in her bedroom.
Jurriaan Benschop highlights Piena's working method: 'She has appropriated abstraction without sacrificing the figurative for it. Her work is precisely about that balance between what is defined as form or figure and what remains open or intangible.'
Edited by Mirjam Westen, contributions by Jurriaan Benschop, Francis Nagy.
