Galerie Lelong & Co.

Leonardo Drew is known for creating abstract and contemplative sculptural works that play on a tension between order and chaos. At once monumental and intimate, abundant and sensual, his work uses materials from America's industrial past. Leonardo Drew creates sculptures and installations by organizing accumulations of materials such as wood, scrap metal and cotton to express various themes with emotion: time, the cycle of life, to decay, the effects of erosion. Rich in historical and anthropological references, Drew's work evokes urban life, the human-nature relationship, and African American culture.

For this new exhibition (her 8th at Galerie Lelong), which she has titled From Inside, Kiki Smith has assembled a group of new bronzes depicting hands, which she relates to two large, iconic works from the 1990s: two wall sculptures of human figures, one male Ice Man and one female Black Madonna. She adds a series of delicate drawings from 1995 depicting female body parts and the rare series of prints "Possession is nine-tenths of the law" from 1985. In this way, the artist highlights the continuity and consistency of her work over the years.

For his first exhibition in France, at Galerie Lelong & Co. in 2019, Samuel Levi Jones had presented a set of large formats that were assemblages of book or portfolio binding flats. For this second appearance in Paris, the artist focused on the very flesh of the deconstructed books, working the resulting pulp to produce near-monochromes of vivid color. He links these "paintings" to his perception of the social and "security" crisis by giving these works titles that directly evoke recent events, both in the United States and in France. He has also been preoccupied with the spines of dismantled books, of which he has made assemblages scaffolded in unstable equilibrium, metaphors of certainties today called into question. A catalog devoted to the artist's work over the past five years will be published at the end of May.

Robert Rauschenberg was introduced to photography in the late 1940s at the famous Black Mountain College. From portraits of his artist friends to impressions of his travels in Italy and Morocco, Rauschenberg's photography is considered the main source of his work. The camera is a way for him to slip into the shadows and observe the changing light, an essential bias for his aesthetic investigations of how humans perceive, select and combine visual information.

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