In 1988, Leonardo Drew found his artistic voice when creating his seminal work
Number 8, which he believes began everything that followed. It was made of wood, paper, rope, feathers, animal hides, dead birds and skeletal remains.
Number 8 was first exhibited at Kenkeleba House in New York City in 1989 where it was "immediately recognized as an aggressive assertion of an artistic identity wrought from personal experience and
cultural heritage." Its ominous allure embodies "the cyclical nature of existence," a reality that reveals the resonance of life, the "nature of nature," a theme that is still prevalent in all of his work. in 2022 In the early 1990s, Drew began to incorporate the element of
rust in many of works by producing it chemically in the studio as well as using collected pieces of
scrap metal collected from the streets of New York. These early works from the 1990s were exhibited in several spaces including
The Carnegie International. In 1992, Drew had his first major solo exhibition at the Thread Waxing Space in New York, which included a published catalogue with an essay written by writer and critic
Hilton Als. The exhibition included many large-scale abstract sculptures made from various materials including wood, rust and cotton. Later on that year, Drew was invited to display work in the
Senegal biennial. During his time in
Africa, he visited an African
slave trading post. Viewing the
catacombs and
dungeons, he realized first hand of the "horrific and claustrophobic conditions" that captured Africans had to endure before being shipped out to a life of enslavement. This experience deeply affected the execution and meaning of his work.
Number 43 is an example of one of the sculptures he created after visiting Africa. The repetition of hundreds of closely packed rust-encrusted boxes filled with rags and debris referencing and symbolizing the horrid living conditions of the slave.
New York Times art critic Roberta Smith describes his large
reliefs as “ pocked, splintered, seemingly burned here, bristling there, unexpectedly delicate elsewhere. An endless catastrophe seen from above. The energies intimated in these works are beyond human control, bigger than all of us” Drew is known for creating reflective abstract sculptural works that play upon the dystopic tension between order and chaos. Leonardo Drew’s work is reminiscent of Post
Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. The materials also reference the plight of
African Americans in
U.S. history. One could find many meanings in his work, but it seems that he is ultimately concerned with the cyclical nature of life and decay, which can be seen in the grid and the transformation of raw material - lumber, steel, canvas, paper - to resemble debris. This method generates an articulation of entropy and a visual erosion of time. The mid-career
survey exhibition,
Existed: Leonardo Drew, was inaugurated in 2009 at the
Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the
University of Houston and later traveled to the
Weatherspoon Art Museum in
Greensboro, NC and the
DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in
Lincoln, MA. A
monograph of his work was published in conjunction with the exhibition by Giles, Ltd., London, with critical essays written by museum director and curator
Claudia Schmuckli and professor and cultural historian, Allen S. Weiss. In 2012, Drew had his fourth solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York that included the publication of a catalogue that chronicles his artistic production from 2007 to 2012 produced by Charta Books. The exhibition featured several large scale installations and works that have been described as imbued with "the kind of energetic core typical of many of Drew's sculptures, as is the blurring of distinctions between what's swallowing or bursting from what's natural or constructed." == Selected solo exhibitions ==