PRESENTATION: Simone Leigh

Over the last twenty years Simone Leigh has created a multi-faceted body of work incorporating sculpture, video, and installation, all informed by her ongoing exploration of Black female-identified subjectivity. Leigh describes her work as auto-ethnographic, and her salt-glazed ceramic and bronze sculptures often employ forms traditionally associated with African art. Her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination commingle.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive

Simone Leigh’s solo exhibition includes eleven new sculptures in ceramic and bronze. Each of Leigh’s new sculptures presents an image of a partially abstracted female body. By “abstracting the figure,” Leigh explains, “I imagine a kind of experience, a state of being, rather than one person.” “Artemis” (2022–24) is a life-size sculpture of a headless woman with a skirt comprised of breast-like forms. The surface of the sculpture is covered with intricate lace drapery made from porcelain. Another new sculpture is a larger-than-life-size bust of a woman, also headless, and completely covered in hundreds of miniature, hand-rolled porcelain rosettes. The highly detailed surfaces of these works reference the repetition of handwork and unacknowledged acts of labor and care traditionally associated with women’s work. “Okwui” (2024) is an eleven-foot-long bronze sculpture of a reclining woman with an elongated skirt made from cast raffia. Many of Leigh’s sculptures investigate the body as vessel, merging the female figure with vernacular African architectural forms. Reflecting on the place of history and allusion in her work, Leigh has said, “I used to think of my work as autoethnographic, but there are moments where you have to explore fiction and narrative in order to connect the dots when there has been so much left out of the archive”. Clay forms the basis of most of Leigh’s artworks, including her bronze sculptures, which are first modeled in clay. The artist pushes the medium’s possibilities through scale and method, challenging conventional, hierarchical fine arts histories, which can still attach to ceramics associations around women’s labor, decoration, domestic crafts, and utility. This exhibition traced the artist’s unique visual language through signature motifs, including cowrie shells, braiding, rosettes, face vessels, and eyeless faces. Through Leigh’s re-performing of these forms in varying materials and scales, new structures of thought and meanings emerge, each consistently centering the experiences and intellectual labor of Black femmes. Her series “Anatomy of Architecture” (2016– ) occupies the liminal space between figuration and abstraction, merging forms drawn from the human body, the built environment, and the domestic realm. Employing a research-based approach grounded in materiality, Leigh renders figures and architectonic forms in bronze, ceramic, and raffia that are imbued with references and sensibilities sourced from Pan-African vernacular culture, ranging from early Egyptian terracotta vessels and the rammed-earth dwellings of the Cameroonian Mousgoum to Nigerian ibeji figures and nineteenth-century African American face jugs. Engaging with histories of black emancipation, Leigh often invokes specific episodes drawn from the legacies of black revolutionary organizations, including the 1970s Philadelphia-based MOVE and the Black Panther Party, as well as the United Order of Tents, a secret society of black women nurses founded during the era of the Underground Railroad. In 2014, she produced the Free People’s Medical Clinic, a temporary space for collective healing and wellness services administered by and directed toward black women. Named after an initiative founded by the Black Panther Party and housed in a brownstone owned by the first African American obstetrics-and-gynecology practitioner, the project examined themes of resilience, collectivity, and self-reliance.

Photo: Simone Leigh, Monster 2023–24, Stoneware, 26½ × 26½ × 19¾ inches; 67 × 67 × 50 cm, © Simone Leigh, Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street & 526 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 8/11-21/12/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com/