Leonardo Drew, City in the Grass, aluminum, sand, wood, cotton and mastic, 2019 (Collection of the artist, Courtesy Talley Dunn Gallery, Galerie Lelong, and Anthony Meier Fine Arts; © 2019 Leonardo Drew; Photograph: Leonardo Drew/Madison Square Park Conservancy)
Who: Leonardo Drew, Mary Sabbatino
What: “Galerie Lelong Conversations”
Where: Galerie Lelong Zoom
When: Wednesday, September 2, free with advance registration, 2:00
Why: “Galerie Lelong Conversations” continues September 2 with Tallahassee-born, Bridgeport-raised, Brooklyn-based sculptor Leonardo Drew, who will be speaking from his studio with gallery vice president and partner Mary Sabbatino. They will be focusing on Drew’s newest projects in addition to his first outdoor installation, City in the Grass, a striking amalgam of miniature buildings on undulating carpets with holes where grass can grow through.
In his artist statement about the commission, which was on view in Madison Square Park from June to December of last year, Drew explained, “Reaching. It’s all about reaching. Life lays out its plan, but you need to reach to achieve. My journey to realize City in the Grass is a life diagram filled with twists, turns, thrills, and doors blown wide open. What I had in mind and where I ended up are vastly different . . . for all the right reasons. Working outside and understanding the poetic and concrete concerns is a learning curve that needed to be addressed. The idea of meeting the existing (historic) skyscrapers with a vertical/monumental structure was quickly scrapped. . . . What if we switched the perspective? How the kids in my neighborhood read my works on the floor of my studio convinced me that this was the direction. Gulliver, Lilliput. From cinema, The Wizard of Oz, Metropolis . . . The details are explained in the piece itself. Imagining that my philosophy of viewers being complicit in the completion of the art could be made whole is truly a revelation in this particular work. While they walk on it, lie on it, climb on it, they add to (and subtract from) the new iteration ‘the new self of the work.’ Could not and would not have it any other way.” The work is currently on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art. You can watch previous “Galerie Lelong Conversations” with Kate Shepherd here and Jaume Plensa here.