Olga Leonova — about

Olga Leonova is a multidisciplinary artist based in Düsseldorf, Germany. Trained in architecture, she began her professional career in architecture before moving into fashion design and art direction, where she worked for more than fifteen years. With over twenty years of professional experience across architecture, fashion and visual practice, she now focuses on contemporary art.

Her work explores textiles, clothing and discarded materials through questions of memory, consumption and material value. Leonova transforms these materials into sculptural and conceptual objects through processes of reconstruction, compression and preservation.

I work with what remains after use — discarded textiles, garments and material traces of human and industrial presence.

My practice grew out of my background in architecture and more than fifteen years of experience in fashion design and art direction. I am interested in what happens to things when they lose their original function or value. This may be clothing that has already been part of someone’s life, or objects that were never used and simply became unwanted.

I am also interested in the question of material inheritance: what each of us leaves behind together with the memory of a person. Clothes and possessions can carry a powerful emotional connection, yet after their owner dies, they can also become a difficult legacy to let go of. Through my practice, I look for another way to preserve these traces — creating things that can continue to exist and remain meaningful for another generation.

I transform these remnants through compression, layering, reconstruction and preservation, creating forms that exist between object, material memory and the trace of production. I am interested in the tension between what we choose to keep and what we discard, between material and emotional value.

I do not try to restore the past — I give its traces a new physical form.