Saskia Leek
VAULT spoke to Aotearoa New Zealand artist Saskia Leek about nostalgia, pathos and humour, ahead of two solo exhibitions produced following a period of loss and inaction.
Image credit: Saskia Leek, Dear Repeats (5), 2023, oil on board, 52 x 42 cm. Courtesy Ivan Anthony, Auckland
Saskia Leek (pronounced ‘lake’ in the Dutch manner, as her mother was always reminding me) was born in Christchurch, Aotearoa in 1970. After a long stint in Auckland, she relocated to the grungy South Island university town of Dunedin after her partner, artist Nick Austin, was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 2012 and they decided to stay on. She is a graduate of the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts and finished her MFA at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 2016.
Winning the prestigious Olivia Spencer Bower Award in 1997 brought Leek to wider public attention, in the wake of slightly older Canterbury graduates like Tony de Lautour, Peter Robinson and Séraphine Pick. Like them, her painting style had a comic book-like quality, tracing a genealogy to the likes of the Hairy Hoo and Philip Guston. Leek’s take on this ‘new history painting’ was less a social commentary and more of a nostalgic, quasi-anthropological look at the experience of being a tween in late 1970s Aotearoa: pop music, ponies and crushes on boys.
By the late 1990s, this had evolved into a kind of polished simplicity – a sort of soft-focus School of Paris lite – that drew on charity shop prints and postcards as sources. Leek intuited that their emotional connection transcended mere sentimentality and kitsch, and her response demonstrated an appreciation for the integrity of their aesthetic. This resulted in sophisticated and uniquely fascinating images of budgies, q ... Subscribe to read this article in full
