Abby Leigh

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.

Work 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. 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." 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." The resulting paintings "beg for free association", resembling everything from bacteria floating in water or graffiti,

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." 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." 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. 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.

"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

"The results resemble...pregnant Robert Ryman canvases that delicately balance the scientific and the artistic"—Artnews

"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