Michael Dumontier

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Yeardley Leonard, in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street.  Recent paintings, collages, and drawings by Michael Dumontier will occupy Gallery 2.  There will be an opening reception for the artists on Thursday, June 24, from 6 to 8 pm.

In her third solo show with the gallery, Yeardley Leonard further develops the rectilinear geometries and vibrant palettes of her earlier paintings.  In addition to six new canvases, Leonard extends her work into an environmental dimension with installation paintings-stripes and rectangles of color applied directly to the walls of the main gallery.  The bars of color, placed at architectural junctures, indicate a geography of light and color.

Rather than seeking the spirituality of non-Western culture, or distraction in pop culture, Leonard has re-oriented the American frontier in the geometric matrix: the cinema screen, computer monitor, bar code, city grid.  Our communal world is one of pulsating, rectangular swaths of movement and color; Leonard generates paintings of an intensity, simultaneously serene and riotous.  The forms of the paintings, constructed entirely of ninety-degree angles, recognize the evolution of the reverential circle into a square.  Each work functions as a focal point of personal reflection, as well as an entry into cultural constructs.

Yeardley Leonard’s work has been the subject of articles and reviews in Artforum, Art In America, Time Out New York, Art & Auction and Interview Magazine.

In Gallery 2, Michael Dumontier will present new paintings on panel, collages, and drawings of frail objects amd forlorn situations.  Stacks of books, scattered buttons, broken records, lonely acorns- Dumontier’s humble subjects are miniaturized, abstracted, and rendered with the most minimal of means-a snippet of paper, a think pencil line, flat and dutifully rendered paint.  Dumontier was a founder of Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge, subject of a traveling retrospective at the Drawing Center last year and L.A. MOCA this fall, and his work shares with that of the group a sense of dry wit, an infectious inventiveness , and a modesty of expression.  This will be the artist’s first solo show in New York.