Leoncillo and the Soul of Clay

Presented in collaboration with Galleria dello Scudo, this solo presentation marks Leoncillo's first New York exhibition in over 30 years. About Among the most significant sculptors of the twentieth century, Leoncillo Leonardi—known as Leoncillo—worked with clay from childhood to his earliest days as an artist. During his career, he first created figurative ceramic sculptures, reflecting Baroque and Cubist influences, before turning in the late 1950s towards abstraction. The works he made from this point, until his untimely death at the age of fifty-two in 1968, portray the material essence of clay. For Leoncillo, it represented the ultimate embodied medium; "Clay is like my own flesh, an absolute process of identification (whose expressive prerequisites I know like the fingers of my hand, just as the choice of cracked surface alongside glossy surface is one of the coexistences that fill my days)." Focusing on the radical body of sculpture Leoncillo created in the last ten years of his life from the late 1950s to the 1960s, the presentation honors the artist's singular relationship to the ceramic medium—revealing how clay and terracotta acted not only as Leoncillo's primary materials, but also as an eternal extension of the artist himself. Read more Toggle Sculpture