Mel Leipzig “Painter Of People”

Gallery Henoch

This event has ended.

Since he first showed his work in 1963, Mel Leipzig has been chronicling the quotidian details of ordinary peoples’ lives. A painter ahead of his time, he has focused on matters large and small that characterize their activities and surroundings, including an astute awareness of the way race, ethnicity, and class saturate the human experience. Highlights from his 67-year career will be featured in this exhibition organized with assistance from Margaret M. O’Reilly, Executive Director/Curator of Fine Art, New Jersey State Museum.

In her essay, “Mel Leipzig: Painter of People,” O’Reilly provides insight into Leipzig’s inspiration and passion for creating art: “At nearly age 87, he continues to push himself to reconsider the possibilities for space, by removing walls and bringing the outside in, abstracting environments into a near surreal state. His palette has also become brighter and bolder in the last decade, an outgrowth of a series of paintings of graffiti artists he produced in the 2010s. Taken with their brash use of color, Leipzig expanded the limited palette he had long employed, unlocking a new vibrancy in recent work.”

Leipzig has had over 45 one-person exhibitions, including shows at museums, art centers and university galleries in New York City, New Jersey, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas. In 1998, he was the subject of a retrospective at the New Jersey State Museum. Leipzig’s works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Academy Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. In New Jersey, his paintings are in the collections of the New Jersey State Museum, Montclair Art Museum, Morris Museum, Noyes Museum of Art, and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Other collections include the White House Collection, Woodmere Art Museum and the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the Springville Museum of Art. His work is also included in numerous private and corporate collections.