Katya Leonovich: Katya’s Ghosts
By Elga Wimmer
Katya’s Ghosts, a solo exhibition by Katya Leonovich of watercolors, agua fortis etchings, and a multimedia installation including fashion design and film. The exhibition ran from April 2nd to April 28th, 2026.
The show opens with Gotham Girl (neoprene, cotton, organdy, leather) and Mother Gothel (cotton organdy), multilayered flowing fabric, in black and white. The work suggests an uncanny cross between Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Alan Jay Lerner’s My Fair Lady.
Katya Leonovich, “Protoform,” leather, plastic, aluminum, 18” X 24” X 28.5”; ‘“Cyborg Husk,” leather, plastic, aluminum, 18” X 24” X 28.5”
The exhibition continues with the artist’s recent large watercolors, from 2025, which evoke dancers rendered in theatrical hues of blue and pink, brown and black, purple and green. The smaller aqua fortis etchings are darker, depicting bodies, as in The Family and the Ghost, while others are expressionist portraits, as in Portrait I, Portrait II, Portrait III.
Katya Leonovich, “Ice & Ash” (2017) size small, length 53’’ leather, neoprene; “Deflection II,” size small length 38’’ leather, “Echo & Ice,” size small length 47 1⁄2’’ leather; Echo & Ice, size small length 47 1⁄2’’ leather
The video, Vivisezione: Arte e Moda in Manicomio, 2005, intermingles the artist’s paintings with her early work in fashion design. We see people walking in and out of showrooms, and a male model doing a catwalk in a bridal gown. This turns into a performance, when Leonovich takes a pair of huge scissors and cuts the bridal gown into pieces, a nod to Yoko Ono’s once scandalous Cut Piece.
Today the art world has largely embraced fashion design, a big change since the 1990’s, when fashion was dismissed as, well, fashion. We see historic and contemporary exhibitions focused on the art of fashion in museums worldwide, notably New York’s Metropolitan Museum Costume Department, the Museum at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology), V&A in London, Palais Galliera in Paris among others.
The artist's background as a successful fashion designer in Europe decades ago, largely informs this work which offers an overview of her prolific output over the past 25 years.
Katya Leonovich, “Watercolor I” (2025), watercolor on paper, 50’’ x 80’’
