Transient

ArtUp Gallery is pleased to present Transient, a survey of recent works by Gerda van Leeuwen, whose deeply imaginative practice moves fluidly between printmaking, embroidery, and ceramic sculpture. Rooted in memory yet untethered from literal representation, van Leeuwen’s animals emerge as flickers of presence—migratory, elusive, and emotionally charged.

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Drawing on formative years in the rural Netherlands and an early education steeped in etching and lithography, van Leeuwen has spent decades developing a language that balances technical rigor with intuitive mark-making. Her works are shaped by early memories of observing the fragile rhythms of farm life: births and losses, the cyclical movement of herds, and a quiet knowledge of perpetual impermanence.

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In her embroidered panels and mono-printed works on paper, animals appear in clusters—sketched, stitched, or printed into being. Their restless, often ambiguous, forms repeat, combine and express as species groupings or states of individuation. These explorations continue through sculptural ceramic towers, where dozens of small creatures seem to climb, cling, leap, and tumble in an unbroken choreography of ascent.

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Across mediums, van Leeuwen explores the ephemeral presence of animals as a metaphor for memory, migration, and vulnerability. The works hum with the tension between order and improvisation, the seen and the imagined, the bodily and the spectral.

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Transient invites viewers into a world where animals become carriers of history and emotion—reminders of the delicate, interdependent lives we observe, care for, and ultimately cannot hold still.