Leidy Churchman “Earth Bound”

Matthew Marks Gallery 522 W 22nd St.

[Image: Leidy Churchman "Buddhadharma Fever" (2019) Oil on linen. 86 1/8 x 102 1/8 in.]

This event has ended.

Matthew Marks presents Leidy Churchman: Earth Bound, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street.

In Churchman’s work, no subject is off limits. The scale of these sixteen new paintings varies from a one-foot-tall abstract composition to an interior scene more than eight feet wide. One painting depicts the camera lenses of the newest iPhone arranged like three eyes, another a bouquet of roses, while another, based on a Tantric divination card, pictures a cloud-covered Earth from space with a new Earth rising up behind it.

One of the paintings in the exhibition depicts a monumental sculpture of a reclining Buddha carved into a granite cliff in Sri Lanka during the twelfth century. Churchman’s painting renders not only the statue’s drapery but also the signage and stanchions added to the site in more recent times. This embrace of the literal and the idealized is a central component of Churchman’s work.

Leidy Churchman was born in Villanova, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and lives and works in New York. Their work has been shown at museums including MoMA PS1 and the New Museum in New York, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Last year, the Hessel Museum at Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, organized the most comprehensive exhibition of Churchman’s work to date, including more than sixty paintings made in the past decade.