Nikki de León (b. 1987) is a painter and sculptor based between California and Germany. With a background in interior design and architecture, alongside professional experience in wood and metal fabrication, her practice is fundamentally rooted in the logic of playful construction.
Of German and Mexican-American heritage, de León’s work is shaped by an ongoing dialogue between these structural influences and the physical properties of her materials. Her compositions are defined by abstract, geometric forms that emerge from a profound blackness. While her paintings achieve a sharp, graphic precision, her sculptural works exist in a state of precarious equilibrium, creating structural frameworks that find their own stability within the unknown.
Artist Statement
My practice is an act of abstract construction from an unseen foundation, distilling structural and spatial elements into a state of autonomy. My work is a refusal to simply inhabit the world; instead, it is a commitment to defining it through the logic of my own structures. In my paintings, blackness is not an end, but the origin: a structural void where I establish a new set of laws of joy. These compositions live through the precision of the edge, which defines the weight of the color. It is a study of structural resistance: the form exists as a counter-narrative to the surrounding darkness. My sculptures translate this inquiry into physical space. By working with solid materials to achieve a sense of weightlessness, I play with the traditional perception of heaviness.