Biography, Selected Exhibitions, Artworks and Selected Press
Leonardo Drew Dossier 2024
Leonardo Drew
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Biography
Leonardo Drew (b. 1961, Tallahassee, Florida) is a New York-based artist who, over three decades, has become known for creating contemplative abstract sculptural works. Drew transforms accumulations of raw materials such as wood, scrap metal and cotton to create works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. His surfaces often approach a language of their own, embodying the laboured process of writing oneself into history.
Drew currently has solo exhibitions in the UK and the US with new site-specific installations at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, respectively. Solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University (2022); Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson (2020); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (2020); de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, California (2017); Palazzo Delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Italy (2006); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2000).
Drew’s mid-career survey, Existed, premiered at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in 2009 and traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2023
Leonardo Drew, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, UK
Leonardo Drew, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
Leonardo Drew: New Works, Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, Texas
2022
Leonardo Drew, Goodman Gallery, London, UK
Leonardo Drew: Cycles, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer Foundation, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University 19
2021
Leonardo Drew, Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, New York
Leonardo Drew: Two Projects, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut
Leonardo Drew, Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris
Leonardo Drew: Cycles, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer Foundation, Eskenazi Museum of Art, University of Indiana; the Frost Art Museum, Florida International University
2020
Leonardo Drew: Making Chaos Legible, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina
Leonardo Drew: City in the Grass, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson
Hammer Projects: Leonardo Drew, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California
2020
Leonardo Drew: New Works, Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, Texas (online)
2019
Leonardo Drew, Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, California
2023
The Alchemists, Johnson Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia (forthcoming)
2022
What’s Going On, Rubell Museum, Washington, DC
A Celebration of Trees, Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, New York
Strange Weather, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, University of California
The Scene Changes: Sculpture from the Collection, Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska
Start Talking: Fischer/Shull Collection of Contemporary Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina
2021
New Prints and Editions, Galerie Lelong, New York, New York
Hockney to Warhol: Contemporary Drawings from the Collection, The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
2020
Waking Dream, Ruby City, San Antonio, Texas
Polyphonic: Celebrating PAMM’s Fund for African American Art, Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, Florida
Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
Accidents (Part II), Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong
Materials and Objects, Louise Nevelson and Leonardo Drew, Tate Modern, London United Kingdom
Selected Exhibitions
Leonardo Drew, Number 360, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2023. Courtesy of the artist, Goodman Gallery, and Galerie Lelong & Co. Photo © Jonty Wilde (5).jpg
Leonardo Drew
Sat 18 Mar – Sun 29 Oct 2023
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Chapel
Living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Leonardo Drew’s abstract works, made from an outpouring of chaotic elements, create installations that express immense tension and turbulence. Number 360 (2023), commissioned for YSP’s 18th-century Chapel, was a powerful reflection on the weight of collective experience, memory, and the cycles of life and death, decay and regeneration. This resonated within a historic building where many lives have been played out for centuries – unknown to us, yet somehow conveyed by the atmosphere of the space.
Drew joins several artists in responding to the Chapel, which was built in 1740 and is a singular, contemplative place. Projects here set out to connect emotionally with a wide humanity and to be welcoming to everyone. Previous artists include Ai Weiwei, James Lee Byars, Kimsooja, Rachel Kneebone, Shirin Neshat, Yinka Shonibare, Chiharu Shiota and Bill Viola.
The basic material of Number 360 was plywood, either blackened or covered with textured coloured paint, which has been ripped apart and splintered to form the building blocks of a conical monolith that surged to over five metres in height. Unusually for Drew, Number 360 was a vertical installation, responding to the height and width of the chapel nave.
Like an explosion held in time, Number 360 conveys ferocious energy as well as trauma and rupture. Drew’s fractured surfaces create their own language, embodying the laboured process of writing the artist’s experience into history. An African American artist born in Tallahassee in 1961 and raised in public housing in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Drew has often alluded to socio-political issues in his work, using such symbolically charged materials as cotton, rope, rags and rust that relate to the antebellum South, the African American experience, and America’s industrial past. He is, however, adamant in his resistance to impose explicit meaning, and chooses to title his pieces only with numbers in order, “to give the viewer enough room to find themselves in the work”.
LEONARDO DREW
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
June 17, 2023 – June 30, 2024
Sculptor Leonardo Drew is the next contemporary artist to transform the Museum’s first floor galleries with a new site-specific commission. Known for his large-scale, multi-dimensional installations, Drew employs organic materials to create topographies that are at once looming in size and stunning in their intricacies. For Number 235T, Drew will anchor sculptural pieces that he refers to as “planets” and surround them with hundreds of smaller objects as he works to identify the interconnectedness of them all.
Leonardo Drew
16 March – 23 April 2022
Goodman Gallery London
For this exhibition, the New-York based artist transforms the lower-ground of the gallery with a monumental site-specific installation. This piece, together with other works on view, span recurring motifs in Drew’s oeuvre – an intuitive approach to composition, materiality and the language of abstraction.
Drew is known for creating wall-based abstract sculptural works that play on a tension between order and chaos. The artist typically uses manipulated organic materials to create richly detailed works – seemingly bursting from the walls – which resemble densely populated cities or urban wastelands and evoke the mutability of the natural world. Materials include wood, cardboard, paint, paper, plastic, rope, string and tree trunks.
LEARN MOREhttps://goodman-viewingroom.exhibit-e.art/viewing-room/leonardo-drew#tab:slideshow
The artist subjects these elements to processes of oxidation, burning and weathering. These labour-intense manipulations mimic natural processes and transform these objects into sculptures that address formal and social concerns as well as the cyclical nature of existence. Drew’s long-standing interest in lifecycles and how human labour leaves traces of life behind is an important aspect of the materiality of the work.
Leonardo Drew
Goodman Gallery Johannesburg
27 May - 01 July 2023
Goodman Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition on the African continent for American Abstractionist Leonardo Drew, presenting a major site-specific work as well as a new series of wall-based sculptures. The exhibition is organised in close collaboration with Galerie Lelong & Co.
Drew’s studio-based practice - which he describes as “becoming the weather” - acts out the passing of time, visually echoing natural forces through scrapping, digging, burning, and rusting to create gravity-defying, wall-based cosmologies:
“There is definitely an alchemy that is involved at all levels. Because when I am rusting and burning things, I am using the weather and I am learning how to become the weather. There is never a time when there is not a natural force that I am either using or echoing” For Drew, the viewer completes his work and brings it to life. This informs the decision to number his works and avoid titles which inevitably confer meaning:
“I am always in one way or another learning from the viewer. They are complicit in finishing the work. If I gave my works titles, then you would be clued in on what I am thinking about. A number is like cataloguing and that’s it”
Selected Artworks
Leonardo Drew
Number 231 – diptych, 2020
Wood and paint
Work (each): 185.4 x 61 x 12.7 cm (73 x 24 x 5 in.)
Work: 185.4 x 139.7 x 12.7 cm (73 x 55 x 5 in.)
Unique
Leonardo Drew
Number 279, 2020
Wood and paint
Work: 199.9 x 199.9 x 103.1 cm (78.7 x 78.7 x 40.6 in.)
Unique
Leonardo Drew
Number 276, 2020
Wood and paint
Work: 175.3 x 134.6 x 101.6 cm (69 x 53 x 40 in.)
Unique
Leonardo Drew
Number 259, 2020
Wood and paint
Work: 91.4 x 325.1 x 55.9 cm (36 x 128 x 22 in.)
Unique
Leonardo Drew
Number 324, 2021
Wood and paint
Work: 193 x 27.9 x 71.1 cm (76 x 11 x 28 in.)
Unique
Leonardo Drew
Number 355D, 2022
Plaster, wood, calcium carbonate, and paint on paper
Work: 91.4 x 91.4 cm (36 x 36 in.)
Unique
Leonardo Drew
Number 366, 2023
Wood, plaster, cotton, and paint
Work: 76.2 x 101.6 cm (30 x 40 in.)
Unique
Selected Press
FORBES – In A Candid Interview, Leonardo Drew Discusses His Latest Art Installation And Why Art Matters
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BOMBS – Leonardo Drew by Kennedy Yanko
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HYPERALLERGIC – The Galactic Visions of Leonardo Drew
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THE BROOKLYN RAIL – LEONARDO DREW with Charles Schultz
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FINANCIAL TIMES – Artist Leonardo Drew’s explosive sculptures draw order from chaos
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ARTNET – Spotlight: Celebrated Artist Leonardo Drew Constructs a Scene of Legible Chaos in His New London Exhibition
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