Over eight million species share this planet, yet we experience life as a human. Dene Leigh explores what this means through paintings, sculptures and works on paper centred on consciousness, memory, and perception.
His practice emerged after witnessing his grandfather suffer a stroke, losing the ability to recognise familiar faces and communicate through language. This experience prompted an ongoing investigation into identity, memory, and the ways we construct our understanding of ourselves and others. Following the loss of his mother, Leigh's inquiry expanded through meditation and the study of spiritual traditions. These experiences continue to inform a practice
that embraces mystery and the unseen.
His trompe l’oeil paintings draw from found objects, personal tokens, and imagined artefacts arranged in dense, sculptural compositions executed in a style reminiscent of Old Master painting techniques and Surrealist collage. Faces are obscured, fragmented, or cropped, while capturing beings and animals in a state of metamorphosis.
Alongside painting, Leigh produces sculptural works and works on paper. Found objects and paper are altered, painted, and reassembled, leaving traces of previous forms behind. These works explore transformation and impermanence through processes of reconstruction and release of the past.
Leigh returns to a single question; what does it mean to be alive? His work explores the tension between what we carry from the past and what we choose to let go.
About the artist
Dene Leigh is a British artist based in London. He studied at Wimbledon College of Arts London. His work has been featured in Hi-Fructose Magazine, FAD Magazine, and Art Maze Magazine. Leigh won the SPACE Artist Awards in 2021 and has been shortlisted for the Brewers Towner International 2022, the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize 2021, and the Young Masters Art Prize 2014. He has held solo exhibitions at Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, and participated in group exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai, Gallery Rosenfeld, London, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London, and Towner Gallery, UK. Leigh was commissioned by Canterbury Museums and Galleries, in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London, to create a painting for the Mirror Mirror exhibition, which brought together works from both collections. The resulting work was acquired for the permanent collection of Canterbury Museums and Galleries.