Jac Leirner After Rosebud, 2016

The intimate format indexes effect and precision: Leirner carefully painted colorful bars, either straight or wavy, interrupted along four vertical axes. Asymmetric yet harmonic, the work’s formal theme is rendered with utmost attention to detail.

During her studies, Leirner explored color through a series of watercolors informed by Bauhaus instructor Johannes Itten’s seminal color theory. Drawing on the teachings of Itten as well as the studies of color of the early twentieth-century painters Josef Albers and Paul Klee, she builds each composition through carefully layered washes of luminous pigment—a process that requires patience, precision, and a finely trained sense of color. Leirner often remarks, “I have the head of a painter,” a sensibility we continue to find in her later watercolors.