The young painter Leanne Picthall (*1999) from Western Switzerland is showing her most recent oils on canvas in the Cabinet of the Museum Franz Gertsch. This is her first solo exhibition in a museum.
Leanne Picthall’s oil paintings can be categorised according to classic genres such as self-portrait, portrait, still life, and animal portrait. The artist is also interested in the interaction between humans and animals on a personal level. Her pictorial language is derived from the aesthetics of contemporary smartphone photography. She develops her paintings from unusual or strongly zoomed-in details, as well as stills from videos she stages and films for this purpose. Childhood experiences and emotions, but also her grandmother, her brother who works as a bicycle mechanic, friends, her dog, and other animals are the artist’s subjects. Some of her pictures feature text with phrases such as “afraid of a lot” or “it’s fine”. As the daughter of a Canadian-German mother and an English father, Picthall grew up trilingual and gives her works English or French titles.
The works shown in the Cabinet provide an insight into the artist’s perception of people and animals, of relationships – represented with motifs from her life and the lives of those close to her, her environment. A new group of works (2025/26) is based on a video in which she interacts with her dog while wearing make-up that mimics its coat pattern. She translated a selection of stills from this film into paintings. The exhibition also includes some older works (2023/24).
The central themes in Leanne Picthall’s current work explore what it means to be an artist, to perform – to represent something, to act – both on a stage and in everyday life. And yet, these works based on snapshots, zoomed in details, or selfies the artist captured with her smartphone maintain a sense of playful ease and are open to interpretation – an impression that is underscored by the restrained colour palette with its muted shades of black, white, light blue, and green.
In 1999 Leanne Picthall was born in Genolier, a municipality in the Nyon District of the Canton of Vaud. After a preparatory year (2019–20) of art and design at the École de design et Haute école d’art du Valais (édhéa) in Siders, she obtained a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the HEAD, the Haute école d’art et design in Geneva, in 2023. That same year, she was awarded the Prix Tremplin/HEAD of the Fondation Leenaards, Lausanne. Since 2019 the artist has been represented in group exhibitions. In 2024 she had her first solo show at the Skopia Gallery in Geneva. In 2025 she took part in the group exhibition “COME-BACK! L’art figuratif en suisse: une scène au féminin” at the Musée d’art de Pully in Pully. The artist lives in Borex and works in Nyon.
The show was curated by Anna Wesle in collaboration with the artist.
