Rosa Loy is a female painter based in Leipzig. Her naive and magical realist paintings of flowers, women and landscapes give a unique view of the world and refer to her complex personal mythology.

Rosa Loy was born, and brought up in, what was, communist East Germany. Loy continues to live and work in Leipzig and her work forms an important part of the flourishing and diverse art scene currently occurring around the city. Although not directly political, the work is informed by a sense of removal, or isolation from Western feminism and contemporary art practice. Loy has said that when the Berlin Wall came down ten years ago, it meant that for the first time she could visit Italy and see quattrocento wall paintings. This visit had a profound affect upon her practice and led to her current use of casein - pigment mixed with the protein of milk - which gives the colours a luminescent quality, adding to a sense that these works come from another place and time.

Rosa Loy’s paintings are often figurative, and the scenes depicted seem to suggest themselves as illustrations for a set of surrealist narratives. The authoritative female protagonists are depicted in scenes of quiet subversion, as in Züchtung, 1998, where two identical female scientists happily gaze upon cells through laboratory equipment; are they engaged in an experiment, or are they, like us, just viewers, enchanted and perplexed by the strange nature at work. The double, or twin image in Züchtung, is a reoccurring motif in the work; flowers, aspects of the architecture and landscape, all have elements that refer to the idea of a twin soul, or sister to the artist. This doubling in the paintings is just one of the reasons these remarkable works invoke a feeling of ‘otherness’, of being witness to a truly original view of the world, ordered by a very personal, and complete, belief system.Rosa Loy was born in 1958 in Zwickau, Germany and currently lives and works in Leipzig

Loy has exhibited widely in Europe including solo exhibitions at Galerie Fiedler, Leipzig, 1993; Winterfestival, Juväskylä, Finland; Bayrische Vereinsbank, Leipzig 1995; Leipziger Hof, Leipzig, 1996 and Die Kur-Quelle für Gesundheit und Schönheit, Leipzig, 1998. Group exhibitions include Lust und Last, Nürnberg, Leipzig, Goldrausch, Künstlerinnenprojekte, Berlin, 1997; Visitez ma tente, Bahnhof Westend, Karl-Hofer-Gesellschaft, Berlin, Pictures of Pictures, Arnolfini, Bristol; Norwich Art Gallery, Norwich, 1999 and Kunstverein Backnang, 2000.

Rosa Loy has featured in the following publications; Pictures of Pictures, Arnolfini, Bristol; Norwich Gallery, Norwich and Rosa Loy, VEAG, Berlin, Germany