Bio
Susan Landesmann is a Vienna-born artist whose work explores the emotional and physical landscapes of women’s lives. Trained in graphic design at Parsons School of Design in New York City, Landesmann spent decades as an award-winning creative director in Los Angeles before shifting her focus toward a dedicated studio practice. Her background in design—rooted in precision, composition, and a deep sensitivity to color—continues to inform the visual language of her paintings.
After years investigating the interplay of shape, line, and vibrant color, Landesmann’s recent work turns toward the figurative, bringing the female form into dialogue with her long-standing interest in geometry and abstraction. Working primarily in acrylic and mixed media, she examines themes of aging, interiority, identity, and the dualities inherent in a woman’s emotional world. Her paintings often explore moments of solitude, vulnerability, and reflection, while also embracing the freedom, resilience, and self-possession that emerge with age.
She has exhibited at The Other Art Fair and in curated exhibitions at The Braid in Los Angeles. She is also a Juried Artist Member of the Los Angeles Art Association. Through both her design and fine art practices, Landesmann is committed to creating work that invites introspection, narrative, and emotional resonance. She currently lives and works in Malibu, California.
Statement
My work emerges from a lifetime spent thinking in shape, color, and structure. Trained as a graphic designer at Parsons in New York and later building an award-winning career in Los Angeles, I developed a visual language rooted in precision, balance, and intentionality. For years, my artistic practice centered on abstraction—geometric forms, saturated color, and the interplay of line and space. These early explorations laid the foundation for a shift that has become central to my current work: bringing the human figure, specifically the female body, into dialogue with that abstract vocabulary.
My paintings begin with color and composition, but they move into the deeper terrain of womanhood, aging, memory, and the quiet emotional landscapes that accompany them. I am drawn to the tensions inherent in growing older: the loneliness that can arise, but also the profound sense of freedom, self-possession, and interior richness that time makes possible. The women in my paintings often exist in contemplative or symbolic spaces—part architecture, part dreamscape—where form becomes a vessel for emotional truth rather than literal representation.
Alongside acrylic and oil on canvas, I work in mixed media, incorporating found fabric, handmade paper, and fragments of texture into my compositions. These materials carry their own histories—worn edges, fibers, and patterns that echo the lived experience of the body. In pieces like my geometric lavender collage, these elements become structural and poetic, grounding abstraction in something tactile and familiar.
Across both my figurative and abstract works, I aim to create images that feel at once intimate and expansive. Each piece is an invitation into a particular emotional world: quiet, searching, resilient, and deeply connected to the evolving story of what it means to inhabit a female body over time.