A Colour Has Many Layers. Liesbeth Piena
3 – 5 September 2021 
Public Opening exhibition, Mini Galerie, temporary exhibition location: Oetewalerstraat 73 in Amsterdam

Opening 2 September: 18-21h, book release at 19h 

Jap Sam Books  proudly presents the new publication A Colour Has Many Layers. Liesbeth Piena on the occasion of the granting of the Sieger White Award to Liesbeth Piena and the opening of her solo exhibition at Mini Galerie. 

Liesbeth Piena makes powerful paintings in which plants and natural landscapes are reduced to essential forms. She looks at reality with an analytical eye, in which small details attract her attention. From her observations she isolates striking fragments and uses them to compose new images. 

In A Colour Has Many Layers, beautifully designed by Florian Schimanski, and edited by Mirjam Westen, author  Francis Nagy was inspired by Piena's fascination with nature for her short story 'Cloud Forests'. She describes how the I-character scrapes the earth from the soles of her father's shoes in order to evoke the scent of trees in her bedroom.

Jurriaan Benschop highlights Piena's working method: 'She has appropriated abstraction without sacrificing the figurative for it. Her work is precisely about that balance between what is defined as form or figure and what remains open or intangible.'

The Sieger White Award is named after the artist couple Fred Sieger (1902-1999) and Helen Sieger-White (1911-2010), who had a deep desire to encourage young talent. Since 2012, the Sieger White Award has been presented every two years in the Netherlands to young, up­-and­-coming artists up to 35 years of age from the eastern part of the country. The award consists of a publication worth €25,000 and an exhibition at a renowned gallery in the western part of the Nether­lands.