Leon pozniakow

Leon Pozniakow (b.1982) is a British artist living and working in London and New York. He has an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art (2020) and a post graduate diploma from the Royal Drawing School (2013). Through a multidisciplinary practice of drawing, metalwork, casting and painting he examines homosexual alterity, assimilation, tenderness and the vocabulary of the self. Responding to love and its innocence the objects become reliquaries of gay life and love. Pozniakow has a sincere love for sentimentality - for him it is synonymous with devotion or cherishment.

The artist‘s treasuring of life is imbued in the work through the technologies employed and the labour of his touch. Pure gold and palladium applied in beaten leaf turns glass into mirror. Rosebuds from the garden, berries and other items get frozen in time through casting in jesmonite. Paintings re-stage events recorded in photography and through monochrome reduction evoke the singularity of remembering. Across all the manifestations of his working, the subjects, whether a duel portrait of himself and his partner or the isolated glimpse of a remembered moment of self awakening, the materiality succeeds in reifying the experience and delivering the commonplace with loving tenderness.