Rosa Loy

 
 

Rosa Loy can thus be seen as one of those who participate in weaving the precious magic curtain that drifts through the epochs, in the shadow of which monsters surely also nest, but whose touch always has a healing effect. In the process, she pursues the great mysteries, seeing herself involved in circles where lost female knowledge circulates and is rekindled. And whoever delivers himself up to her pictures with an alert mind can sense their inherent vitality overflow onto himself.

— Riese, Rauch, & Steiner

Selected Works

Glade

Selected Press

Featured
Rosa Loy - Artnet
Rosa Loy - Artnet

Every day artist Rosa Loy rides her bicycle 10 kilometers through Leipzig from her home to the studio she has kept since 1994. “My mind clears of everything I’ve been thinking of at home,” she said during a recent conversation. “I go into the studio, have a tea, start to paint, and see what’s coming in. I wait for a tingling feeling like someone is watching me from behind. That’s where my ideas come from.”  

Rosa Loy - Flaunt
Rosa Loy - Flaunt

Like vivid flowers blooming out of damp soil and bright eyes emerging from dark wombs, German artist Rosa Loy has trekked deep through the trails of her own subconscious, lush with shaded verdure, and come to a restful pitstop within lichtung, a word she describes as “the place in the middle of a dark forest where the sun is shining.”

Rosa Loy - ARTFORUM
Rosa Loy - ARTFORUM

In Leipzig-based painter Rosa Loy’s phantasmagoric compositions, the industrious, rosy-cheeked women of socialist realism are recast in Kafkaesque mise-en-scènes, in which they farm human-faced heads of lettuce, feed lollipops to Harpies wearing headbands, and recline on couches in poses of analysands more than odalisques.

About the Artist

1958 Born in Zwickau, Saxony
Lives and works in Leipzig, Germany

Rosa Loy’s work is born of a worldview influenced by her upbringing in Leipzig, former East Germany, isolated by Communism and the Berlin Wall. As part of the post-reunification New Leipzig School, Loy’s work deals with themes surrounding the mystery of women, femininity, and the new Romanticism. Recent exhibitions include Herbarium, Lyles & King, New York, NY (2023); Lucky Days, Gallery Baton, Seoul, South Korea (2022); Flowers on the Border, Space K, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Rosa Loy, Museum der Stadt Bensheim, Bensheim, Germany (2020); Neo Rauch & Rosa Loy: La Torre, Fondazione Coppola, Venice, Italy (2019). Loy’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Busan Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea; Art and Museum Centre Sinkka, Kerava, Finland; and Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig, Germany, among others.
 

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