Goodman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Leonardo Drew, featuring a striking new series of eight recently created wall sculptures and six new works on paper, collectively crafted from wood, glass and painted plaster. Running concurrently with Drew’s first institutional solo exhibition at the South London Gallery, this presentation further solidifies his presence in the city. Through his engagement with material, Drew continues his exploration of form, texture and spatial dialogue.
Artworks
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Renewal, decay, fragmentation and reconfiguration are central to Leonardo Drew’s practice. Using hand-weathered raw materials—washed, burnt, broken and reassembled—his works carry a history embedded in their form. Everyday and industrial objects retain traces of their original structure, revealing the tension between destruction and regeneration. Through nonlinear compositions, Drew embraces disorder and disintegration as part of a continuous cycle of interpretation. In his largely monochrome works, colour becomes physical rather than purely visual—another material shaped by time and process.
Through abstraction, Drew’s sculptures offer a vast repertoire of imagery. Works such as Number 440, Number 441, and Number 444 are dense and layered compositions that feature geometric formations — the repetition of squares that collectively form a larger square gives the works a structured, grid-like presence. Conceptually, the work alludes to entropy—not as a direct depiction of order and chaos, but as an undercurrent accentuating the fragility of form and the possibility of transformation. Crisscrossed ruins, tessellated fragments, and broken remnants recur throughout, reflecting an assemblage process that is both methodical and intuitive. Defined by open forms, asymmetry, and subtle gradations in colour, scale and texture, the works reveal a delicate balance between structure and unpredictability.
Drew continues his practice of assigning numbers as titles to the works—such as Number 429, Number 439 and Number 446—a deliberate choice that resists finality and keeps the interpretation of the work open to multiple readings. The numbers, which are not static but rather accumulate progressively, highlight the notion that each individual work is a composite of many ideas and previous works that have been subsumed, layers upon layers that are embedded into the final image. In this way, the number acts as a reminder that what we see is the result of many ideas and influences that have come before.
Artist Bio
Leonardo Drew (b. 1961, Tallahassee, Florida, USA) is known for his significant installations and sculptures which explore the tension between order and chaos. Drew transforms accumulations of raw materials such as wood, scrap metal and cotton to create works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. His surfaces often approach a language of their own, embodying the laboured process of writing oneself into history.
Drew’s work has been seen in major museums worldwide. He was commissioned for a new outdoor project City in the Grass for Madison Square Park in 2019, marking the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s 38th public commission and the artist’s first major public outdoor art project. City in the Grass was presented as a solo exhibition in three museums, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2021); Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson (2020); and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (2020). In 2022, Drew was elected as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design. Another major new commission featured at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK in 2023. Drew’s mid-career survey, Existed, premiered at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in 2009 and travelled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Collections include: Tate, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD.
Drew currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
