Sophie Leininger

Artist Statement:

Sophie Leininger addresses the personal indirectly so viewers may relate to their  own emotions more intimately. Her drawings, paintings, and sculpture explore sentiments of control, destruction, loss, and devastation.  Yet, figures are rarely present, giving a ghostly quality to the evidence left behind.

Inspired by images wherein only traces of the destroyer are apparent, her subjects include landscapes at the mercy of natural and human disaster.  Likewise, her series of broken and discarded sea vessels become allegories for the complexity and cosmic sorrow of the human condition.

She uses gesture, abstraction, and a thoughtful palette to explore the dramatic, impermanent, and ephemeral nature of her subjects, and looks to non-traditional methods of paint application to further depict impossibly dramatic scenarios.

Sophie Leininger is an Oakland-based artist working at the Compound Studios.  She is a graduate of Mills College, where she earned a B.A. in Studio Art and Literary and Cultural Studies.  A product of this diverse educational background, her interests are dispersed among traditional studio art forms as well as public art, writing, theory, and criticism.  As a student, her written work was published in a variety of campus media, such as The Walrus (Eucalyptus Press).  Her visual work was featured in the 2009 Mills Senior Thesis Exhibition at the Mills Art Museum.  

She has exhibited locally and nationally, participating in group shows at The Compound Gallery and solo shows at Farleys on 65th (Emeryville, CA) and The Cellar Gallery (Yakima, WA).  She has also produced two works of public art; one painted mural in the Laurel District of East Oakland, and one mosaic mural for the Shalom School in Sacramento, CA.