Leslie Baum

Gallery Affiliations: Devening Projects + Editions

Region: Midwest

My work is alphabet-like, with individual pieces functioning as fully realized objects and as the building blocks for paintingbased installations. The work unfolds across diverse media and scale, and includes large oil paintings, tabletop drawings, standing floor panels, animations, watercolors, and spray-painted drawings. Each material contributes a particular surface and has its own personality. A mindful engagement with modern painting sensibilities anchors this multiplicity. By sampling the modern canon indirectly, through the lens of memory and through the vagaries of digital representation, the work progresses like the children’s game of telephone. The distortion and misquotation of the original yield fresh imagery, surface, and palette. Fragments from iconic paintings appear and reappear. Although many of the art-historical references are transparent, their legibility is muted by the imperfection of my hand. Accidental and inadvertent gestures define this project. Experienced piece by piece, the work celebrates moments both known and unnoticed. Taken as a whole, it is an ode to painting’s recent history and its pluralistic present.