Derek Franklin, TOS #5, 2023, oil on canvas, 50 x 62". Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery.
The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Peter Gronquist: Manifest, featuring new large-scale sculptural paintings and an interactive sculptural installation. The show highlights Gronquist’s interest in excavating personal history through manipulation and exploration of unconventional and found materials. In this inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Gronquist presents two different avenues of material investigation.
The first, the mammoth installation Missoula Floods (2023), is an automaton for making line drawings on sheet metal. In this artwork, a group of boulders connected by chains to a small motor suspended from iron beams is dragged across painted sheets of metal, resulting in rough-hewn, scraped lines etched into the surface. Though constructed from heavy machinery and materials, Gronquist inflects his artwork with a personal poetic: the boulders are sourced from the Columbia River, the artist’s childhood stomping ground.
The bulk of the works on view push the bounds of what can be called a painting - dynamic, wallmounted abstract sculptural assemblages. In these works, the artist manipulates a wide range of materials: polyurethane molded to resemble bone fragments, dyed wasp paper, wool, lace and other textiles, rose quartz, ash, metal, and what are essentially fossilized event posters, painstakingly chiseled from area telephone poles. On all these surfaces the artist applies paint in a soft palette of white, pale blue, blush and orange. The resulting all-over compositions, with jutting shards at odd angles in dreamy-hued colors, are simultaneously evocative of a big bang moment of creation, and a post-apocalyptic moment of destruction. In this liminal space, the artist’s own referents—small doodle-like drawings with personal significance scattered throughout each painting—are glimmers of stardust in the aftermath.
Peter Gronquist is a multi-disciplinary artist working in diverse mediums and materials ranging from video and painting to sculpture and site-specific installations in our natural and built environment. Based in Portland, Oregon, Gronquist draws inspiration from the pastoral sensibility and rural backdrop of the Pacific Northwest to create work inflected by a sense of rough poetry and impermanence. Gronquist has exhibited in galleries and fairs across the globe, most recently at Hashimoto Contemporary, Winston Wachter, Primary projects, and bitforms gallery.
ED BEREAL
Wanted: Ed Bereal for “Still Disturbing the Peace”
The gallery is pleased to present Wanted: Ed Bereal for “Still Disturbing the Peace”, featuring new sculptural installations. The exhibition continues Bereal's many year examination of socio-political themes of racial inequity and corruption in the United States, but with a new material exploration using innovative technologies.
Known for his gestural drawings and meticulously crafted oil paintings and assemblage sculptures, for this exhibition, Bereal has created vertically suspended large-scale three dimensional artworks which the artist terms topographical drawings. These are the first works of their kind by Bereal and present a significant new direction in his practice with their embrace of new technologies like 3D scanning and 3D printing to further explore more traditional methods of mark-making like sculpting and drawing.
Each artwork is a kind of rendering etched into the substrate of clear nylon exposing the contours of a figure that appears to be entangled by, or fighting to emerge from, clear acrylic bars which resemble the stripes of the American flag. When lit, the shapes and lines of the artist’s drawing ethereally appear to float in midair, revealing Bereal’s political aims: pointing to the illusory promises of the flag, and the implicit contradictions of what, and for whom, it stands.
The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to announce our participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2023. The gallery will feature a solo exhibition of historic works by Ed Bereal including drawing, photography, and video. Ed Bereal: Disturbing the Peace will be on view in the art fair’s Survey Sector December 6 – 10, 2023.
Ed Bereal attended Chouinard Art Institute from 1959-1962 and later taught at University of California, Irvine and Western Washington University. His work is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); The Smithsonian Institute (Washington D.C.); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA); Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX); and The Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn NY) among others. Recent exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France) in 2006 and Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden) in 2009; L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, Tilton Gallery (New York, NY) in 2006; as well as participating in Pacific Standard Time at The Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA) in 2011. His first museum retrospective, Wanted: Ed Bereal for Disturbing the Peace at the Whatcom Museum of Art (Bellingham, WA) in 2019 and Bereal’s recent APEX installation at The Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR) was on view February 23, 2020 through June 27, 2021.
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