Anu Lehis

Three things come together in my works: my love for my partner, the current situation in the world and our relation to the flat we live in. These paintings are of love in one space, in a continuous constant documenting the process, moving together with the unstoppable passing of time. It is of a claustrophobic stay at home, where my only options were to either do, or to do not and degenerate in inaction. Next moment landing in his embrace, taking a pause from the forced activity we put ourselves in.

Even if my life during that time was very repetitive and even boring, my inner world wasn’t. These paintings express exactly that, repeating in their iconology, but differing in their emotional expressiveness. Us holding each other, painting after painting, same as day after day, but the feelings that accompany it – in perpetual motion, not stopping in the stagnation of time.

The paintings are exhibited unstretched, in the same raw form they were created in. They became a diary, depicting us intertwined while documenting moments in time directly and indirectly. These paintings became something alive – wrinkling on the floor, getting covered in dust and hairs, us jumping over them while moving in the small room I was painting in.

The canvas is hung on the wall frayed with visible creases from their transport from their origin place to the gallery space. This further solidifies these paintings as something living – they are not static and smooth, but robust in their presentation, just as life itself.