Judith Leinen

Berkeley, CA
Residency: February–March 2016

The work of Judith Leinen is a product of communication in an open pool of experiences consisting of space, language, encounters and material. It is first and foremost sculptural. Her installed or mobile pieces want to tell stories, but listen to stories as well. They are triggers of communication using archetypal opportunities of places but extend them and turn them around. Her interactive sculptures and space-related installations revolve around parallel worlds, material, varying concepts of reality and fiction, participation and the analysis of systems. Her work‘s appearance in public space often triggers unexpected feedback and reactions. The decision for a change of location, leaving the own comfort- zone, arriving, investigating and spreading, the acquisition of a place and making it accessible is fundamental to her work. Judith Leinen is looking for unknown factors and researches the complexity and synchronicity of things formally and otherwise. Her work uncovers the great potential of a volatile and intangible communication between a place and it’s humans. With her art-collective Upper Bleistein and on her own practice, she experiments with the boundaries of sculpture and explores public and hidden spaces.

Judith Leinen was born in 1985 in Prüm, on the German-Belgian border. She graduated from Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz and Kunstakademie Mainz, Germany where she earned degrees in art, mathematics and pedagogics. (Staatsexamen, equivalent to MFA). Since 2007 she has participated continuously in solo and group exhibitions and co-founded the art group Upper Bleistein. Judith Leinen has been teaching as a guest scholar at California State University Chico for two years and is permanent faculty at the department of architecture at Technical University Kaiserslautern.