It is with great sadness that we announce the death of artist Edwina Leapman, who died on 20th August at the age of 94.
One of the gallery’s longest-standing artists, Leapman was known for her minimalist paintings that investigate the interplay of light and colour, often painted in her London studio. Her first solo exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art was in 1976 and we enjoyed a long relationship; her last solo show being held at the gallery in 2018. Solo exhibitions were held elsewhere including the New Art Centre, London in 1974 and at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1991.
Edwina Leapman was born in 1931 in Hampshire, England and studied at the Slade School and Central School of Arts in London. She was drawn to abstract painting in the late 1950s, but her interest in abstraction was further informed by painting from New York of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though interested in Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, she developed her own style and method of working based on line and process. Guided by parallel lines she drew a brush from left to right over a dense ground of indefinable colour built up by thin washes. The paint engaged with the canvas with varying intensity and depth establishing a characteristic rhythm which demonstrated her emotive reference to music: tone synonymous with pitch and colour with scale.
In early works of the 1960s Leapman was preoccupied with painting in a way that was on the edge of perception. Colour was more monochromatic, almost absent. In the intervening years she gradually began to use colour in a more active way; “One of the reasons for this change is to be in darkness as well as light […] The colour sensations are used to move the surface of the ground spatially, and this causes perceptual shifts by the colour, making an equal tonality.” The paintings show the process of working - the movement of the brush, the density of paint - and were built up line by line, the apparently random accents gradually coming together to form rhythms that create the particular mood of the painting.
“Learning to paint was almost an interruption of being. It has been necessary to forget and discard layers of knowledge, education, and sophistication. For me art is the process of coming back to oneself. To the place one started. To catch the experience in retrospect.”
Edwina Leapman in 2013
Leapman’s works are held in several major collections including the Tate Gallery and the Arts Council, London. She was highly respected by her peers with a steadfast commitment to abstract painting. She will be greatly missed.
