NYAB Event - Hector Leonardi Exhibition

Hector Leonardi Exhibition

Dillon Gallery

This event has ended.

Hector Leonardi is one of the most accomplished artists among the second generation of American abstract painters, which includes Sam Francis, Jules Olitski and Alfred Jensen. This, his third solo exhibition with the gallery, continues a brilliant career spanning over six decades. He not only witnessed but participated in much of the contemporary art created since the emergence of the New York school. The show includes several monumental works, groundbreaking in both scale and virtuosity.

Hector Leonardi’s work has been continuously experimental for more than five decades. A student of Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt at Yale University during the heady period of post-war experimentalism, he absorbed their lessons and rigorous discipline and combined them with an appreciation of light derived from Monet and the Impressionists. Leonardi is a master of color and texture, having developed an innovative technical approach that involves the application of strips of acrylic over a painted canvas. The melding of several paintings into one allows him to flirt with geometric patterns even as he engages the surface energy of Pollock’s expressionism. The result was recently described by critic and painter Robert C. Morgan as a “chromatic articulation virtually unparalleled in painting today.”

The paintings convey a substantial range of subliminal responses as the psychological reactions of the viewer are constantly enhanced by his masterful understanding of color. Each painting possesses an overall tone that is modulated by a range of contrasts, and these contrasts provide an emotional depth and complexity, a tension between constructive and energetic forces, that is unique in contemporary abstract painting.

Leonardi is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale, where he received his MFA.

[Image: Hector Leonardi "Usson" acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 in.]