PRESS RELEASE………………………………FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 29th through April 5th, 2008
June Leaf’s most recent works established her as a maverick, resolutely independent artist. For this show she has reworked pieces from earlier in her past in addition to making completely new works. In this way she plays with the vicissitudes of time as she draws upon her own history and creates her own present in works that are poetic and elusive. Leaf nurtures her vision through her constant engagement with life here in New York and in Nova Scotia, depicting friends, landscapes, and inventions of fantasy in paintings, drawings, and sculptures.
Leaf captures and transforms the everyday and unfamiliar in paradoxical works both fragile and fierce, always striving for the unguarded gesture and unaffected impression. Leaf insists on the handmade integrity of her objects. If a mechanical device is needed, for a scrolling sculpture for example, she builds each element from scratch herself. When painting, she enlarges the physical canvas by stitching on extensions, often many times. Leaf’s works are accumulations of gestures that record the process of thoughts becoming form. As the concept grows and expands, everything expresses the organic flow whether welded, forged, drawn, painted or stitched!
Her works literally seem to grow in front of us from conception to maturity. With works of ethereal beauty and images of startling directness June Leaf takes the viewer to her particular place of visionary experience.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 recently held at the Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2004. She is represented exclusively by the Edward Thorp Gallery.
Gallery hours are from 11am to 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday. For more information please call (212) 691-6565 or email: [email protected].