This exhibition of Abby Leigh's large-format oil paintings and small works on paper — the largest show of the New York artist's works on the West Coast — offered an extended meditation on the relationships between gesture and com-position, structure and surface. Curated by Jarrett Earnest and featuring pieces Leigh made between 2011 and 2013, this expansive show filled all of the gallery's three floors.
The large oils, with titles such as Taxi Lane (2013), Sixth Avenue (2012), and Bridge 3 (2013), take compositional inspiration from cityscapes seen in passing-the blurred outlines of structures glimpsed from a subway car or speeding cab —and evoke the underlying rumbles and rhythms of New York City life. These cool blue or green color-field grids have variously sized stripes with edges that appear to pulse between hard and hazy. In Bridge 3, Leigh delicately bled a central column of horizontal stripes into soft fields of translucent blue that flanked it on either side. The edges of the column are crisply delineated at some points and left undefined at others, recalling passage over a gently rippling body of water.
Interspersed with the paintings were examples from Leigh's "Target Series," an astonishing suite of works on paper made by masking off and saturating areas with wood smoke. Immaculately applied and as luminous as encaustic, these tonal fields of soot manage to be both formless and restrained, concretely suggestive while remaining ambiguous and nonrepresentational. Where the paintings utilize linear grids to suggest architecture, these works repeat concentric smoke rings in hypnotic compositions that recall both solar coronas and human irises — and the smoke leaves behind a surface that is surprisingly smooth. Each of Leigh's otherwise rigid compositions is softened by the unpredictable impressions of materials, and, shaped by precise acts of subtle balance, yields increasing complexity over time.