Léa Fontaine

paints windows you can live with.

BORN IN UKRAINE, 1993 · BASED IN MUNICH

Léa Fontaine has been drawing since she could hold a pencil. Ten years of art training in Ukraine — Khmelnytskyi, Odesa, Kyiv — taught her to treat painting as a craft: stretching and priming her own canvases, drawing until every proportion holds, building colour layer by layer. She graduated as both an artist and an art teacher — and anyone who is meant to teach others to see has to see very precisely herself.

Since 2015 she has worked in Munich. She is a perfectionist by nature: a painting leaves the studio only when the smallest detail is right — the highlight in an eye, a single feather, the shadow under a hat brim. That precision is exactly what gives her room to play. Literary characters, animals and pop-culture heroes step into her pictures with a wink, and sometimes unusual materials find their way onto the canvas — once even a real gold bar.

She works in series and rarely stays with one style for long: what begins on canvas is sometimes carried on to the printing plate. Each series is a new attempt, not a repeat of the last. Rigour in the craft, wit in the subject — that is how you recognise a Léa Fontaine.

MEDIA: Acrylic · oil · watercolour · digital
PRINTMAKING: Etching · drypoint · linocut
SURFACES: Canvas, fabric, gold & metal leaf
EDITIONS: Originals 1/1 · limited prints · commissions

BY DAY · THE STUDIO

She also runs a studio:GT.Agency.

Léa is the founder and owner of GT.Agency, a full-service digital agency in Munich — motion and graphic design, web, branding, illustration and 3D. The two jobs feed each other: the studio taught her to build a composition that works at a glance, the easel reminds her to leave room for the slow look. Sapientiago itself was designed and built there.

Visit gt.agency →

TRAINING

2005–2009
Art school
KHMELNYTSKYI
Sculpture, clay modelling, basics of drawing, painting and composition.
2009–2013
Grekov Art School
ODESA
Secondary specialised education, two qualifications: Artist-Designer, and Teacher of primary grades in specialised art schools. Academic painting, drawing, composition, colour theory, decorative and applied art, sculpture, photography, wall painting, materials science, art history. Canvases made by hand: stretched and primed.
2013–2015
Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts
KYIV
Bachelor of Design, Environmental Design. Drawing, painting and composition in year one; then landscape and interior design, 3D visualisation, spatial planning, basics of construction, technical drawing and CAD, projects in 3ds Max.

AND THE CURATOR