Abby Leigh is an American artist based in New York City. Her work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; among others.
Abby Leigh's work consistently deals with the same themes: the relationship of order and randomness; microcosm and macrocosm; and with what lies beneath the surface, both literally and conceptually. She is deeply engaged with and curious about her materials, which are often unusual, such as drawing with smoke, axes, or sledgehammers. [1] Her most recent sledgehammer series is the culmination of previous investigations in materials, subject matter, and technique. “Leigh’s process begins by beating Dibond aluminum panels with a sledgehammer, covering them with dents and dings. From there she layers oil paint, pigment and wax in a range of near monochromes—pinks, blues, and blacks.” [2] Leigh then scratches the battered surface of the aluminum in a technique that draws comparisons to automatism. “Sometimes she paints over and into these forms. Other colors are revealed as she cuts into the glittering metal, which is left exposed.” [2]
The labor-intensive process produces visual and tactile variation in each piece. [3] The resulting paintings “beg for free association,” resembling everything from bacteria floating in water or graffiti, [2] and have been compared to Yayoi Kusama’s engagement of the infinite and the “visionary abstraction of Arthur Dove.” [4]
In a review of Leigh’s sledgehammer paintings, Alfred Mac Adams writes: “unlike banal abstraction this work takes the viewer back to the erotics of landscape, the fetishizing of nature that transforms mountains and trees into voluptuous bodies. Flesh makes us acknowledge the sexual charge latent in traditional landscape painting and in this brilliant reinvention of it. Abby Leigh has created a brave new world for abstract painting.” [4]
In earlier bodies of work such as her smoke drawings, Leigh captures the gaseous, ethereal quality of smoke. [1] Jarrett Earnest wrote that they are the some of the “clearest statements of her sensibility and visual ingenuity.” [5] Leigh works to record the smoke’s movement without manipulating it, explaining “I wanted to isolate the smoke and to examine what seemed random but is actually the result of physical forces such as the density of the air.” [5]
“For Leigh, pleasures of the mind are always deeply and meaningfully inextricable from the pleasures of the senses.” [6] The contemplative element present in Leigh’s work arises from her inquisitive and analytical nature, as well as physical limitations. As an extremely nearsighted person, Leigh’s experience of the world focuses on things she can engage with up close. [1] A “profoundly myopic” person, her spatial orientation influences her subject matter and how she depicts it. [1] “I don't have depth perception,” Leigh explains, “so whatever I work on, I see in layers rather than perspective. When I see something, I have to infer where it is in space because it's not evident.” [7] Through her process of examination and artistic intervention, Leigh turns the microscopic into the macroscopic. In her paintings, drawings, and works on paper, there is always more than meets the eye. [3]
Leigh's early career flourished in Europe, where she showed extensively in France and Italy, as well as Denmark and Belgium, beginning with her exhibit at the Chapelle de Pénitants Blancs in Vence, France. In the decade following this first solo exhibition in France, Leigh's work was shown in solo exhibitions in Europe thirteen more times, and her career in New York began with a series of solo exhibitions. After 2005, her career shifted to the United States with solo shows at Betty Cuningham Gallery, Stefan Stux Gallery, Johannes Vogt Gallery, among others. When Leigh's first solo exhibition with the Betty Cuningham Gallery opened in 2005, the concentration of her career shifted to the United States, where her solo exhibitions have been concentrated in recent years.
Leigh was born and grew up in New York City. She attended Brandeis University where she majored in Theater Studies before receiving a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in Theater at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, England. She enrolled in drawing classes in the Art Students League in New York, where her teacher, Will Barnet, encouraged her to become a painter. Leigh was married to Mitch Leigh (1928–2014), the composer/producer. Together, they have two children: Eve Leigh, a playwright, and David Leigh, an opera singer.
Leigh's work is held in the following public collections:
Speaking about Abby Leigh's "The Eye is the First Circle," a series of painting and ink drawings between 2005 and 2007, Art in America's Susan Rosenberg said "we might well herald myopia as a condition to be cultivated by 21st-century-artist-visionaries." [8]
"What is perhaps most remarkable about the drawings in My Personal Atlas is the balance between the lyrically private and the analytic. The unfolding biomorphic flow of these drawings inevitably evokes the introspective surrealism of an artist like Arshile Gorky…"—The Brooklyn Rail [9]
"The results resemble…pregnant Robert Ryman canvases that delicately balance the scientific and the artistic"—Artnews [10]
“One recalls the anthropometry of Yves Klein, those impressions of nude models involving the breasts, the stomach and the sex of the females, which is to say the seat of vital, autonomous functions which escape direct control by the brain: breathing, digestion and orgasm. That fine vitalist manifesto! The diffused humanoid vegetal sexuality that Abby Leigh lets us see is also a hymn to love of life through its essentially primary and autonomous energetic impulses: it is the orgasm of nature in its plenitude, the triumph of planetary eros.” —Pierre Restany [11]
Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Inka Essenhigh is an American painter based in New York City. Throughout her career, Essenhigh has had solo exhibitions at galleries such as Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, 303 Gallery, Stefan Stux Gallery, and Jacob Lewis Gallery in New York, Kotaro Nukaga, Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo, and Il Capricorno in Venice.
Ena Swansea is an artist based in New York City. Her paintings often take memory as a point of departure.
Yvonne Helene Jacquette was an American painter, printmaker, and educator. She was known in particular for her depictions of aerial landscapes, especially her low-altitude and oblique aerial views of cities or towns, often painted using a distinctive, pointillistic technique. Through her marriage with Rudy Burckhardt, she was a member of the Burckhardt family by marriage. Her son is Tom Burckhardt.
Angela Dufresne is a Brooklyn based American artist known for paintings that explore narrative in a variety of ways. Dufresne holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, MO and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. She is currently faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Judith Godwin was an American abstract painter, associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.
Patty Chang is an American performance artist and film director living and working in Los Angeles, California. Originally trained as a painter, Chang received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, San Diego. It wasn't until she moved to New York that she became involved with the performance art scene.
Robert Neffson is an American painter known for his photorealistic street scenes of various cities around the world, museum interiors and for early still lifes and figure paintings.
Lee Lozano was an American painter, and visual and conceptual artist.
Nancy Grossman is an American artist. Grossman is best known for her wood and leather sculptures of heads.
Betty Blayton was an American activist, advocate, artist, arts administrator and educator, and lecturer. As an artist, Blayton was an illustrator, painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She is best known for her works often described as "spiritual abstractions". Blayton was a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem and board secretary, co-founder and executive director of Harlem Children's Art Carnival (CAC), and a co-founder of Harlem Textile Works. She was also an advisor, consultant and board member to a variety of other arts and community-based service organizations and programs. Her abstract methods created a space for the viewer to insert themselves into the piece, allowing for self reflection, a central aspect of Blayton's work.
Channa Horwitz was a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles, United States. She is recognized for the logically derived compositions created over her five-decade career. Her visually complex, systematic works are generally structured around linear progressions using the number eight.
Betty Merken is an American painter and printmaker who lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
Christopher Wilmarth was an American artist, known for producing sculptures using primarily glass and steel.
Kim McCarty is an artist and watercolor painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. She often works in large formats using layers of monochromatic colors.
Betty Hahn is an American photographer known for working in alternative and early photographic processes. She completed both her BFA (1963) and MFA (1966) at Indiana University. Initially, Hahn worked in other two-dimensional art mediums before focusing on photography in graduate school. She is well-recognized due to her experimentation with experimental photographic methods which incorporate different forms of media. By transcending traditional concepts of photography, Hahn challenges the viewer not only to assess the content of the image, but also to contemplate the photographic object itself.
Susan Rankaitis is an American multimedia artist working primarily in painting, photography and drawing. Rankaitis began her career in the 1970s as an abstract painter. Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago while in graduate school, she had a transformative encounter with the photograms of the artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), whose abstract works of the 1920s and 1940s she saw as "both painting and photography." Rankaitis began to develop her own experimental methods for producing abstract and conceptual artworks related both to painting and photography.
Jennifer Packer is a contemporary American painter and educator based in New York City. Packer's subject matter includes political portraits, interior scenes, and still life featuring contemporary Black American experiences. She paints portraits of contemporaries, funerary flower arrangements, and other subjects through close observation. Primarily working in oil paint, her style uses loose, improvisational brush strokes, and a limited color palette.
Caitlin Cherry is an African-American painter, sculptor, and educator.
Graham Nickson is a British artist known for large-scale figurative paintings and drawings. He was born in Knowle Green, United Kingdom. He has lived in New York City since 1976 and he has been Dean of the New York Studio School since 1988, where he developed a "Drawing Marathon," a two-week program of intensive study. Nickson works in oils, acrylics, charcoal, and watercolor.
