'Your talent is God’s gift to you, what you do with it is your gift back to God.' Leo Buscaglia
Artist Statement
I am a London-based British-Hungarian contemporary artist working across painting, installation, and immersive media. My practice is centred on colour, light, material, movement, and perception, with a particular interest in the relationship between the visible and the unseen.
Creativity has been central to my life since childhood. Growing up in an accomplished jewellery-making family, I was surrounded by craftsmanship, an appreciation for beauty, and an understanding of the creative process from an early age. I see artistic ability as a gift, and my journey as an artist as a continual process of discovering, nurturing, and giving expression to it. After more than a decade of painting, I have come to understand art not as a destination, but as a lifelong journey of exploration, growth, and transformation.
At the heart of my work is an investigation of light and darkness as states of presence and absence, uncertainty and renewal, loss and hope. Rather than simply representing light, I seek to create atmospheres in which it can be sensed and experienced. Spirituality is an important part of this process—not as something I seek to illustrate literally, but as an underlying awareness of mystery, transcendence, and the possibility of transformation.
During my MA at the Royal College of Art, I began considering how painting might move beyond the traditional boundaries of the canvas and become a spatial and sensory experience. This continues to shape my practice, which encompasses oil and acrylic painting, installation, video, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR).
My current body of work, The Light Shines in the Darkness, extends painting into video, AR, and VR, considering how an image can become an immersive experience. Red and the tulip are central visual and symbolic elements. Red functions simultaneously as colour, material, and symbol, carrying associations of life, blood, passion, and the sacred. The tulip, rooted in my Hungarian cultural heritage, evokes fragility, beauty, and transformation—growth taking place beneath the surface before becoming visible.
My earlier Rainbow Collection established ideas that continue to inform my practice. The rainbow became a way of understanding colour as a language of hope, transcendence, and renewal: a meeting point between the earthly and the divine. Nature remains an important source of inspiration, particularly in its ability to evoke wonder and remind us of something greater than ourselves.
The creative process itself is a form of surrender. I allow intuition to guide the work, creating space for unexpected connections between colour, form, emotion, and memory. Alongside my fine art practice, I create painted textiles using traditional silk-painting techniques, transforming original artworks into wearable pieces. This dialogue between painting and textiles led to the launch of my London label in 2012.
Biography
Leona Lengyel (b. 1986) is a British-Hungarian visual artist based in London, working across contemporary painting, installation, video, virtual and augmented reality. Her artistic practice also extends to hand-painted silk through her eponymous silk scarf practice, in which she translates her painterly language onto different materials, extending her paintings into wearable forms.
Lengyel holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, where she developed multidisciplinary approaches extending painting beyond the canvas into spatial and experiential environments. Her practice has developed over many years through an ongoing exploration of how painting can move between surfaces, materials, spaces, and modes of perception.
Her practice brings together painting, material experimentation, technology, and personal experience. She is interested in how an image can be encountered in different ways, creating works that invite shifts in perception and experience. Her work has been shown in London and Paris, including at the Royal College of Art Graduate Show, St Barnabas Kensington, and Temple du Marais.
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