The Dragon Gallery
Dene Leigh
available works
artist bio
Dene Leigh's work addresses questions about the fragility and impermanence of the human memory. After observing the neurological impairments that his grandfather experienced after a stroke, the artist specifically represents the impediments faced. He represents the incapacity to communicate and understand language in its written and spoken form, and the inability to identify formerly familiar objects, faces and places.
To explore this notion, the artist constructs drawings on found paper, paintings, collage and sculpture, which prohibit the viewer from seeing and identifying things. Central to these works is his fascination with the painterly and physical act of object-making. Found objects are juxtaposed with other materials and incorporated into structures and sculptural forms that have been dismembered, edited and combined, rendering them ambiguous and unfamiliar. Mutating them from something that could have been known to something foreign, decayed and entirely transformed.
The artist's work displays a strong fascination with the connection between reality, representation and illusion whilst constructing a thought-provoking relationship between the depicted aged materials and the mutable decaying structure of the brain and the body. These works are a juxtaposition of unknown yet visible memories. Throughout his practice, the artist plays with ideas of documentation and traditional portraiture that is contemporaneously and historically specific to drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, assemblage, collage and objet trouvé.
Dene Leigh is a British Artist. He studied Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts London. His work has been written about in international contemporary art publications Hi-Fructose and Daily Serving. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Agnosia' (2016) and 'Ephemeral' (2018) at Baert Gallery in Los Angeles. In recent years his work was selected for the 2014 Young Masters Art Prize and the 2017 and 2018 Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition.
Dene Leigh lives and works in London and is represented in private collections internationally