The Long Brick Wall

We are currently exhibiting an incredible collection from Leonora Oppenheim

‘A portrait of Maggie’s’ – an ode to the west london centre in memory of Bridget Oppenheim. Oringinal artwork and postcards available to buy, with proceeds going to Maggie’s. For sales enquires contact    leonora@eliostudio.com

She is a multi-media artist, working across drawing, photography, text, and sculpture. The thread running through her work loosely subscribes to a sense of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ – that title of the celebrated Kundera book. She has always been fascinated by this excerpt from his novel about human frailty,

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

She explores the landscape of the human body, with all its weight and with all its lightness, while also exploring the form of the body within the natural landscape and the tensions, connections and divisions between the two.