Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to present June Leaf with an exhibit of recent works in various media. Leaf began her career in Chicago in the late 1940's, and has lived in New York since the early 1960's. A resolutely independent artist, her visionary ideas emerge from a compelling engagement with processes and materials, and through constant engagement with her life here in New York and in Nova Scotia. The artist has worked with sculpture, relief, painting, drawing, and mixed media collage, continually asserting the integrity of the handmade while demonstrating an allegiance to narrative symbolism rather than a particular medium.

Leaf’s works are stages filled with dramatic action. Her sculpture continues to reflect her investment in all things mechanical, producing her characteristic exploration of movement. This fluency also occurs in the paintings, as figures animate the surface, capturing activity with a remarkable lyrical freedom.

Continuing to explore the fundamental worlds that she has created over the course of more than six decades, Leaf has been able to conjure works that probe essential questions about humanity, not shying away from quintessential themes such as equality and labor, mortality and redemption. With a focus on both earthly and transcendent humanist themes, her narrative symbolism reveals the essentials of the human condition. She applies her remarkable skills to create haunting imagery with an emotional edge and poignancy that never veers into nostalgia or obviousness.

Her new body of work is a seamless continuation of these themes, reflecting her ability to naturally meld intuition and improvisation throughout the working process. Elements within each piece are reflected in a continuous narrative throughout her entire oeuvre, as the imagery resonates and creates a collective experience. Often unconventional and always original, her imagery is conceived through a lifetime of experience while retaining the vitality and urgency of the immediate.

June Leaf is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Tel Aviv Museum of Art among others. A one-person exhibition of her work was held at the Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2004. She is represented by the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York.