May 16 – August 1, 2009 Now extended until August 15!
In summer 2009, Blaffer Gallery,
the Art Museum of the University of Houston, hosts
Leonardo Drew’s first mid-career survey in the United States. Existed: Leonardo Drew will include a major installation created in
the gallery space, 14 major sculptures realized between 1991 and
2005, and 12 works on paper made between 2005 and 2008, which
together offer a representative survey of Drew’s artistic development
as well as speak to the relevance of the direction the work is taking
today.
Throughout his career, Drew has been continuously engaged with the cyclical nature of existence. Made
to resemble the detritus of everyday life, his formally abstract but emotionally charged compositions have
an aesthetic authority and metaphorical weight that are unique, transcending time and
place in a celebration of things eternal. These works range from the intense drama of his
sculptures and installations of the 1980s, to the epic sweep of his massive wall-bound tableaux of the
1990s, to the ethereal language of his paper casts of the early 2000s. Add the poetic intimacy of his
recent works on paper, and Drew’s practice can be described as a journey toward enlightenment, full of
reprises and returns as well as new beginnings.
Beginning in 2002 Drew began to create sculptures using paper replicas of his ongoing collection of castoff
items that have constituted the material source for his works. Presented on their own or in encasings
of the artist’s making, they introduced a new presence into the artist’s work, a ghostlike immateriality and
a sense of mediation that counter the visceral weight and physical immediacy of his earlier tableaux.
Ever since then, a new economy of means has driven Drew toward a visual poetry of lightness and
simplicity, culminating most recently in his installation Number 123 (2007). With this recent development
also has come a newfound emphasis on drawing. The new installation conceived for this exhibition is
composed of many individual material elements connected through an intricate web of drawings applied
directly to the walls and is his grandest and most ambitious project to date.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph, the first on this artist, published by
Giles Ltd., London, featuring essays by Blaffer Director and chief curator Claudia Schmuckli and Allen S.
Weiss, Associate Adjunct Professor of Performance and Cinema Studies at New York University.
Following its Blaffer debut, Existed: Leonardo Drew will travel to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in
Greensboro, N.C., from February 7 through May 9, 2010.
Existed: Leonardo Drew is organized by Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Linda Pace Foundation, Allen Bennett MD, The Fifth Floor Foundation, Guillermo Nicolas, and The TOBY Fund. Support for the catalogue is provided by Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Video: Leonardo Drew on impermanence and art, filmed by Douglas Britt, chron.com