Virginia Leonard with Gretchen Albrecht
I come out of surgery looking golden

For I come out of surgery looking golden, artist Virginia Leonard has responded to a series of Gretchen Albrecht’s paintings in a sequence of new works in clay, lustre, resin and ink. Here Leonard explores the possibility of a shared visual language with Albrecht by focusing on biomorphic forms of abstraction that are gestural and painterly, glazed in a vivid, gutsy palette. In this context – as an artistic conversation across different practices and materials – the colour of Albrecht’s paintings Belladonna (2013) and Deep and Dark Blue Ocean (2011) could also be seen to evoke the kiln and the chemical reactions it sustains, Leonard’s application of ceramic glazes echoing Albrecht’s layered stains of pigment.