Lora Schlesinger Gallery is proud to present All is Leaf, Patty Wickman’s second solo exhibition with the gallery featuring new paintings. The exhibition opens with an artist’s reception Saturday September 7th from 4-6pm, and is on view through October 19, 2019.

The impetus for the large-scale work in this exhibition lies in an encounter emblematized in the painting, Circumscribe, which depicts a native California manzanita tree with saturated mahogany-red bark and olive-green leaves. Standing before the tree, as her daughter and friend encircled it in play, Wickman experienced it anew. The encounter was not unlike the supernatural clarity that the 17th-century monk Nicholas Herman, later known as Brother Lawrence, described upon encountering a barren tree mid-winter. Herman was transformed by the knowledge that within this seemingly dead, common life form lay hope of revival and potential for abundance. The paintings explore the qualities, conditions and complexities of childhood — a state of completeness yet also of becoming, of vulnerability and dependence moving inexorably towards independence.

Concurrent with these paintings Wickman presents selections from two other ongoing bodies of work: Forty Days and a portrait series, Corner Paintings. Forty Days is the result of a practice in which Wickman makes a painting a day for the 40-day period of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. Based primarily on observation, the paintings draw from daily life and experience. Many depict the transition from winter to spring as all, it could be said, becomes leaf. Awash is one of a series of paintings of the artist’s daughter, chronicling adolescence, identity and self-awareness. Underlying all of the work in this exhibition is an interest in mystery, non-linear narrative and image making.

Patty Wickman earned her BFA from Arizona State University, Tempe, and her MFA from University of Colorado, Boulder. Selected solo exhibitions include Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Dan Bernier Gallery and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including ACME Gallery, Los Angeles; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Frye Museum, Seattle, WA; Denver Art Museum, CO; Laguna Beach Museum of Art, CA; W139, Amsterdam; New York Center for Art and Media Studies; Cornell DeWitt Gallery, NY; and Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago. Wickman is a professor in UCLA’s Department of Art.