June Leaf Recent Works    Dec 15, 2011 - Jan 28, 2012

Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to present June Leaf with a show of recent works in various media and scales. A resolutely independent artist, Leaf cultivates her complex and unaffected vision through constant engagement with her life here in New York and in Nova Scotia.

Leaf’s unique position is reflected in her prodigious output of paintings, drawings and sculpture, which capture the private experience of contemplation and are founded in the artist’s assertion of the integrity of the handmade. With a balance of casual and assured gestures, Leaf is able to conjure works that are poetic and elusive. Her disturbing scenarios evoke an emotional edge and poignancy that never veers into nostalgia and obviousness.

Whether welded, drawn, or painted all of Leaf’s works are stages filled with dramatic action. Her sculptures are both strikingly physical and uncannily subtle. Leaf approaches these as though they were drawings, creating them out of animated gestures and producing images that are both literal and metaphorical. Her paintings, which often depict the interior and exterior environs of her Nova Scotia studio, are marked by ethereal beauty and startling directness. They are delivered with an authoritative spontaneity and with complex combinations of affection and ferocity. Although tough and uncompromising, there is something unusually vulnerable in Leaf’s willingness to make art that is brazenly candid and unaffected.

June Leaf is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Tel Aviv Museum of Art among others. A one-person exhibition of her work was held at the Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2004. She is represented by the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York.

Gallery Hours are from 11am to 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday. For more information please call (212) 691-6565 or email: edwardthorpgallery@gmail.com