Mirjam Westen [ed.] Jurriaan Benschop, Francis Nagy [text]

Liesbeth Piena is prize winner of the Sieger White Award 2020 for talented young artists.

Liesbeth Piena (1993) 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, 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.'

Sieger-White Award
The Sieger White Foundation is dedicated to preserving and disseminating the work of the artist couple Fred Sieger [1902-1999] and Helen Sieger-White [1911-2010] and encouraging young artists from the eastern part of the Netherlands through the Sieger White Award. The artist must already have a modest body of work. The stipend is intended to give up-and-coming artists a chance to reflect on their work and as an incentive to gain more exposure for their work. Liesbeth Piena is the fifth winner after Omar Koubâa (2012), Kim van Norren (2014), Casper Verborg (2016) and .