VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

In summer 2009, Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, is pleased to host Leonardo Drew's first mid-career survey in the United States. Existed: Leonardo Drew will include a major installation created in the gallery space, 14 major sculptures realized between 1991 and 2005 and 12 works on paper made between 2005 and 2008, which together offer a representative survey of Drew's artistic development as well as speak to the relevance of the direction the work is taking today. The exhibition will be on view at Blaffer Gallery, located in the Fine Arts Building on the University of Houston's central campus, from May 16 through Aug. 1, 2009. A free opening reception is scheduled for May 15 from 6 until 8 p.m.

Blaffer Gallery Extends Existed: Leonardo Drew through Saturday, Aug. 15, 2009. Due to the overwhelming popularity of Existed: Leonardo Drew, Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, has extended the exhibition through Aug. 15, 2009. Following its Blaffer debut, Existed: Leonardo Drew will travel to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, N.C., from Feb. 7 through May 9, 2010. The fall exhibitions, Josephine Meckseper and Jon Pylypchuk, open Friday, Sep. 11, from 6 until 8 p.m., and are on view Sep. 12 through Nov. 14, 2009.

Throughout his career, Drew has been continuously engaged with the cyclical nature of existence. Made to resemble the detritus of everyday life, his formally abstract but emotionally charged compositions have an aesthetic authority and metaphorical weight that is as unique as it is symbolic, transcending time and place in favor of a celebration of things eternal. These works range from the intense drama of his sculptures and installations of the 1980s, to the epic sweep of his massive wall-bound tableaux in the 1990s, to the ethereal language of his paper casts of the early 2000s. Add the poetic intimacy of his recent works on paper, and Drew's practice can be described as a journey toward enlightenment, full of reprises and returns as well as new beginnings.

Beginning in 2002 Drew began to create sculptures using paper replicas of his ongoing collection of cast-off items that have constituted the material source for his works. Presented on their own or in encasings of the artist's making, they introduced a new presence into the artist's work, a ghostlike immateriality and a sense of mediation that counter the visceral weight and physical immediacy of his earlier tableaux.

Ever since then, a new economy of means has driven Drew toward a visual poetry of lightness and simplicity, culminating most recently in his installation Number 123 (2007). With this recent development also has come a newfound emphasis on drawing. The new installation conceived for this exhibition is composed of many individual material elements connected through an intricate web of drawings applied directly to the walls and is his grandest and most ambitious project to date.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph, the first on this artist, published by Giles Ltd., London, featuring essays by Blaffer director and chief curator Claudia Schmuckli and Allen S. Weiss, associate adjunct professor of performance and cinema studies at New York University.

Following its Blaffer debut, Existed: Leonardo Drew will travel to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, N.C., from Feb. 7 through May 2, 2010.