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Alfred Leslie: Multi-Panel Mammoths Oct 19 - Dec 15, 2013
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Alfred Leslie
Alfred Leslie in Studio
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Alfred Leslie
Lake Front Property, 1962
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Alfred Leslie
Orange and Black, 1948-1950
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Alfred Leslie
Ornette Coleman, 1956
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Alfred Leslie
Pink Square, 1957-1960
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Alfred Leslie
String of Pearls, 1961
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View :
Past Exhibitions
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Alfred Leslie: Multi-Panel Mammoths
Oct 19-Dec 15, 2013
Probably no American artist has had a period as wildly
prolific and tumultuous as that of Alfred Leslie from
1952-1966. At the outset of this amazing run, “Leslie carried
abstract expressionism to new heights of graphic
vehemence,” stated Alexi Worth, painter and writer. In what
is generally considered an audacious decade in American
art, Alfred Leslie challenged the known boundaries of
discipline specificity, insisting on the relevance of
inter-disciplinarity in his efforts as a writer, painter and
filmmaker.
Leslie, commenting about the 50’s and his provocative
“octopussarian impulses” said, “I wrote what eventually
became The Cedar Bar and The Chekhov Cha-Cha, I began
the mug shot series, Polaroid’s of pretty much everyone who
came into my studio...there were hundreds of them and I
was painting, making silk screens, everything was
overlapping and one day I just said to myself, go for it, let
the multiple disciplines decide who you are”. And they did.
Out poured The Hasty Papers published in 1960 and the films
Pull My Daisy and The Last Clean Shirt as well as the
Multi-Panel Mammoth paintings.
The French art critic Michel Tapié called Leslie’s painting,
“Pink Square” a “brutalist” work and linked the painting to
the world of architecture and low relief sculpture. The
“Mammoths” including “Pink Square”, and “Ornette
Coleman” resonate with rich, thick declared surfaces of oil
paint, layers of the built world piled on, in a powerful and structurally complex visual language. These works led to the
later multi-panel mammoths of the early 60’s, which include
“String of Pearls”, “High Tea” and “Lake Front Property”.
Alfred referred to these paintings as “Abstract Illusionist”.
The collage logic of these groundbreaking works had a
declarative impact on painting during this period. These
multi-paneled works combine masterful paint handling, both
elegant and aggressive, with linked passages of seemingly
disparate events into a single composition.
In a conversation with Nancy de Antonio in May of 2013,
Alfred discussed aspects of these works: “size and scale
change...materials, accumulation and bulk bring different
meanings to things...a pebble and a ton of gravel are not the
same...size is bigness, dimensions that usually reach past
the stretch of one’s arms and the length of one’s
steps...scale is presence, scale tends to step into the space
between the viewer and the picture. When working a
painting that could only be made by walking and reaching, I
saw this layering as one of the ways some element of an
intimate hand could be caught. Multiple-panels extended the
idea and united disparate elements in the way motion
picture film did. I introduced illusionism, trompe l’oeil, made
them look like collages, put a white tie on the earlier blunt
physicality. That kept the open territory of allusions with no
transitions. Brutal and elegant, in painting, are two sides of
the same coin.”
The Hill Gallery is pleased to celebrate the American debut
of this selection of “Multi-Panel Mammoths”.
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