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Lot Essay
"Leslie's work has an indisputable signature: the architecture, the wielding of the loaded brush, and the consistently present double vertical bands. Whether it is a large oil on canvas or a miniature collage, his work is immediately identifiable. Leslie has the ability to impart scale much like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. His small works have great scale and his large works project an even grander sense of scale. This combined with Leslies color sense creates a body of work that epitomizes the power and dynamic of postwar American abstract painting."
A. Stone quoted in Alfred Leslie: Expressing the Zeitgeist , exh. cat., Allan Stone Gallery, 2004, p. 4.
#62 perfectly exemplifies the vigor and intensity that Alfred Leslie brought to his abstract series. Leslie throughout his career has explored a uniquely aesthetic tenet all his own. In addition to his involvement with the avant-garde film and literary ventures, Leslie's direct and gestural abstraction remain arguably beyond the efforts of his older Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, Pollock, Rothko, Newman and Reinhardt.
In #62, the painterly double vertical stroke on the lower left quadrant is Leslie's tribute to Barnett Newman's zips or Mark Rothko's rectangles. Leslie's large painted abstract canvases are related to his earlier collage works. Perhaps inspired by his experiences in assembling collages, Leslie often divided his canvases into painted quadrants, imbuing them with diverging colors and painterly gesture. Allan Stone referred to a "classic dialogue" in Leslie's work, established through a contrast between expansive geometrical scheme and luminous splashes of color. Each one of these compartments of paint stacked next to each other is a lyrical and profound composition in its own right, and together they form an exuberant and timelessness masterpiece.
A. Stone quoted in Alfred Leslie: Expressing the Zeitgeist , exh. cat., Allan Stone Gallery, 2004, p. 4.
#62 perfectly exemplifies the vigor and intensity that Alfred Leslie brought to his abstract series. Leslie throughout his career has explored a uniquely aesthetic tenet all his own. In addition to his involvement with the avant-garde film and literary ventures, Leslie's direct and gestural abstraction remain arguably beyond the efforts of his older Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, Pollock, Rothko, Newman and Reinhardt.
In #62, the painterly double vertical stroke on the lower left quadrant is Leslie's tribute to Barnett Newman's zips or Mark Rothko's rectangles. Leslie's large painted abstract canvases are related to his earlier collage works. Perhaps inspired by his experiences in assembling collages, Leslie often divided his canvases into painted quadrants, imbuing them with diverging colors and painterly gesture. Allan Stone referred to a "classic dialogue" in Leslie's work, established through a contrast between expansive geometrical scheme and luminous splashes of color. Each one of these compartments of paint stacked next to each other is a lyrical and profound composition in its own right, and together they form an exuberant and timelessness masterpiece.