Leunora Salihu
Leunora Salihu, born in 1977 in Prishtina, Kosovo, from very early on, took up a very individual track which she continues to pursue, often combining in her sculptures different materials including ceramic, wood, and metal. Her sculptures, along with the spatial bodies and installations, explore the possibilities and limits of movements by using the repetition of organic and constructive form-elements. She has established a considerable and multi-layered vocabulary of industrial, architectural, and organic forms, which grant her works a sense of functionality, blurring the lines between where the sculpture ends and where the pedestal begins; between interior and exterior.
In 1999 she fled to Germany, where she continued her studies of Fine Art at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel and later at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where she worked with Tony Cragg, and from which she graduated in 2009. She has received several awards and grants, including the Lothar-Fischer-Preis (2017), a fellowship of Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn (2017), the Bronner Residency, Tel Aviv (2014), a working scholarship at the European Ceramics Work Centre in the Netherlands (2010) as well as the Wilhelm-Lehmbruck scholarship (2011). Her work was included in a number of group exhibitions, including The National Gallery of Kosovo (2017), Philara Stiftung (2015), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2015), Temporary Art Centre, Eindhoven (2015), Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (2014/15), and Kunstraum Düsseldorf (2012). The first noteworthy solo exhibitions Salihu had in 2011/12 at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg and very recently at the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (2017). Leunora Salihu lives and works in Düsseldorf.
