Abby Leigh is an artist based in New York City. Her work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum; and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; among others.
Artist StatemenT
While my work varies stylistically, my way of looking does not: I have very little depth perception. I see a layered world with flat, sometimes ambiguous, space. In keeping with such, I work in layers—be it layers of paint, of smoke, of graphite or peach pit soot, of whatever the work in front of me seems to demand. I start an abstract work randomly: making a mark with an axe, an eye dropper filled with sumi ink, or a line of smoke and I suddenly have somewhere to go. In my sledgehammer works, I work the surface until the markings form a coherent visual explanation to me. Often I return to the same surface and I rework it, sledgehammering, axing, sanding, buffing, scrubbing, erasing, adding, or subtracting.
My work often references the body, most specifically the female body. My sledgehammer paintings have openings and holes, with undulating surfaces. The paint becomes a skin, and traces of previous versions leave a scar.
My earliest works were watercolors of fruits and vegetables. Pierre Restany, the art critic, curator and champion of Yves Klein, likened my fruits to Klein’s smashed nudes.*
*the full text is pretty outrageous, actually:
the intimate indolence of pomegranate, of the fig or melon which she lets us see with all the haunting subtleties of the erotomatic: the vulvar splendour of the ripe fig, the abundant viscosity of the cut melon, the successive openings of the pomegranate or passion fruit... this minuteness in organic description goes farther than realistic exigency, it is the sign of a basic emotion that the artist feels by referential transfer to her own sex. That passionate letting oneself go under apparent descriptive exactitude!
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.
Fifty years after Yves Klein, at the dawn of the 3rd millennium, Abby Leigh’s vitalist hymn takes on its full meaning: at a time when all hybrids are permissible, Abby Leigh reclaims the presence of sexual pleasure, which is to say of eroticism in the genetic memory of a global biology. God alone knows what St. Francis of Assisi might have thought, faced with this type of decidedly orgasmic fioretti...
Pierre Restany