Susanne Ledanff - Painter

Susanne Ledanff has been painting since the mid 1980s. She started with water-colors during her trips through Europe. She has been exploring collage and acrylic painting since the early 1990s. After she came to New Zealand in 1995 she continued painting whilst working as a lecturer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. It was in 2014 when she opened her little Gallery Berlin in her house in Seagrave Place. She moved back to Berlin in May 2016. Here she enjoys lively contacts with other artists, participates in courses and workshops and shares a studio space at the Atelier 22 in Niedstr. 22.

In her own words Susanne understands her painting as follows: "My paintings start from emotions and quite often from a personal situation. I develop the metaphorical associations with my state of mind, but then the needs of artistic expression take over. The painting appears more clearly as a work where all kind of strategies, the psychological drama or the story I want to tell, the colors and the composition are combined. My earlier paintings can perhaps be vaguely called expressionistic, namely with regard to the portraits of female and male faces and figures. Later I developed a more narrative style of painting.In more recent times there is a clear tendency toward abstraction while my paintings still hint at a certain thematic or narrative dimension. I like to play with ambiguities and arrangements where themes or shapes emerge only at a second glance.