Talley Dunn Gallery

Talley Dunn Gallery is pleased to announce Works on Paper a solo exhibition of Leonardo Drew’s most recent experiments with wall-mounted sculpture. Frequently working on a monumental scale, Drew has returned to the gallery with a resoundingly captivating body of work that is much more intimate and epigrammatic. These works, while modest in size when compared to Drew’s large-scale installations, are altogether mesmerizing, seemingly containing thousands of undulating handmade components intricately interconnected in cohesive and immersive wholes. The artist imbues his works with a frenetic life force, unabashedly encompassing the broken and worn through splendor and zeal. Leonardo Drew’s artworks assiduously invite the viewer into quiet and individual meditation with abounding personal and political resonances. Taking inspiration both from his childhood experiences and the likes of Piet Mondrian, Leonardo Drew has utilized the form of the grid as a basis for his compositions throughout his career. In the formal qualities of the grid, the artist evokes the repetitive, compact visual symmetry of housing projects from his upbringing in addition to art historical allusions to minimalism. The works on view represent an evolution from this method—this body of work forgoes structural ties to the grid and showcases the ways in which the artist’s creative freedom finds new forms from working on paper with lightweight materials. Where Mondrian conceptualized within the square grid using line and color, Drew’s most recent sculptures weave, build, and meld both organic and inorganic materials from within the square’s even form into distinct lyrical compositions. Within these twenty-three by twenty-three-inch parameters, the artist has meticulously constructed dynamic projecting surfaces using signature materials from the artist’s long-established vocabulary like wood and cotton as well as materials with new significance like plaster and paint. Inspired by trips to Jingdezhen, China’s historic center of porcelain production since as early as the sixth century, Drew made an electrifying turn towards color in the years before the start of the pandemic. Drew’s vibrant compositions of plaster and paint pay homage to the shards and fragments found along the streets of the southern Chinese city. In these ways, Leonardo Drew’s sculptures are full of an energetic spirit and dynamism that is as deeply personal as it is generous as he extends an open invitation to the viewer to revel in all of life’s complexity and beauty.

In Fields and Visions, Gersht returns to the botanical themes that have occupied him for so much of the last decade. The inspiration for this new work comes from the Swiss naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, who travelled to Suriname (Dutch Guiana) in the 17th century and was the first artist to study and record native tropical plants and insects from that region, and the paintings of the American artist Martin Johnson Heade, who travelled to Amazonia in the 19th century in search of hummingbirds and exotic orchids. Despite its convincing realism, their paintings and drawings reveal a fusion of fact and fiction, to create a unique and mysterious world that ignites our imagination.