Leif Harmsen

Leif Harmsen has lived and worked in NYC (Gas Station AveB@2nd), Hong Kong, London (National Portrait Gallery), Sydney and is currently based in Toronto.

He is especially interested in urban environment, portraits, technology and the volatile place where sex money men and class intersect and burn. He is especially prolific with oils, film, digital imaging, digital multimedia and electrical-mechanical contraptions.

For the past two years Harmsen has been focusing on a series of large scale digital pictures in oil on canvas that are based on low resolution reinterpretations of downloaded porn, men's online profile pics, personal and purpose posed photos and drawings. People see in them what they need - be that colourful digital abstraction, obscenity, or erotic delight. They feature rich and sophisticated colour, exacting modern geometry and suggest a digital paint-by-numbers perfection. They prove to would-be censors that obscenity (a legal term) no less than beauty and art, is in the eye and mind of the beholder. The initial idea for the series came out of Harmsen's frustration with the Canadian institutions of censorship, but the pictures stand on their own as abstract colour field painting, and within in ...