“Tennis Elbow 99 Abby Leigh” Exhibition

“Tennis Elbow 99 Abby Leigh” Exhibition

The Journal Gallery (45 White St.)

This event has ended.

Since 2016 Abby Leigh has devised her own lexicon of deep dents, sharp holes, blunt scuffs, and incised scrawls. Against a structure of DIBOND® —a very hard composite of polyethylene sandwiched between aluminum sheets— Leigh wields sledgehammers, ice picks, screwdrivers, and an array of nameless tools with weird ends which pierce and distress the metal. The resulting surface is surprisingly supple, undulant, bowing inward in places then softly swelling out. This “assault” produces the bare bones of a visual composition for the next stage. “After this random given, you have to make sense of it,” she says, “So, you make sense of it.”

Leigh devised this process as a way of working in collaboration with the materials themselves, arriving at mark making and compositions beyond her control, and, in an almost Buddhist sense, at the edge of her conscious mind. The battered surfaces are a visual problem on which her oil painting evolves. From there the painting process is tender, meditative, with the attention they evoke, almost reparative. Often she will re-articulate a depression or a hole in paint with great care. Lately she’s been drawing on the slick surfaces with the point of a screwdriver, which slide around like ice skaters, to create looping all-over drawings with a precarious kind of freedom. Sometimes these marks are then also painted over, leaving faint traces in the body of paint. The final effect is a vertiginous sense of balance, as alluded to in the title of the sole pink painting in the exhibition, Trapeze (2022). There is a freshness, in which the image seems to be changing before your very eyes, that makes these paintings teem with a life all their own.
– Jarrett Earnest

Abby Leigh was born in New York, New York in 1948. She received a BA and MFA in Theater from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, United Kingdom.

Leigh’s recent solo and group exhibitions include “2021 in Vivid Color” at Leslie Feely Gallery in Wainscott, New York (2021); “Uncaged” at Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey (2020); “Vanishing Ocular” Curated by David Salle and Nicole Wittenberg at Rental Gallery in East Hampton, New York (2019); “Sledgehammer Paintings” at Johannes Vogt Gallery in New York, New York (2018); “The Barn Show” at Johannes Vogt in East Hampton, New York (2018); “Print/Paper: American Hand Papermaking, 1960’s to Today” at International Print Center in New York, New York (2018); “Abby Leigh, Pause” at Jack Barrett Gallery in New York, New York (2015); “Attention Span” at Kathleen Cullen Fine Art in New York, New York (2014); “Abby Leigh: Works, 2011/2013” at Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, California (2014); “Uno Per Uno, Uno Per Tutti” at Spazio Pariggi in Treviso, Italy (2012); and “One Evening” at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York, New York (2012).

Work by Leigh is held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York; Guggenheim Museum in New York, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York;Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel; Houston Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Art in Issoudun, France; Midtsønderjyllands Museum, Gram Slot in Gram, Denmark; The New York Public Library in New York, New York; The Farnsworth Museum of Art in Rockland, Maine; and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Abby Leigh lives and works in New York, New York.

Media

• Painting

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