Renowned New York sculptor debuts first solo African expo

Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg is showing an exhibition of sculptural work, which is something of a coup for the gallery. It is the first solo in Africa for renowned New York-based American abstract sculptor Leonardo Drew, which Goodman is presenting in collaboration with Drew’s other representative galleries, Galerie Lelong and Anthony Meier.

Active since the late 1980s, Drew is known for a dynamically abstract approach to natural materials, drawing out layers of social and political significance — and, in these times, ecological significance too — from the cyclical and entropic metamorphoses undergone by such materials as they are subjected to weather, decay and the effects of time itself.

Drew has exhibited and worked in many of the most significant collections in the world, including the famous Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; the Tate in London; and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art. His distinctive abstract language is derived from the weathering of raw materials, including wood, scrap metal and cotton, in his constructions. The dimension of time is crucial in providing a framework of meaning for the interplay between the artist’s work and the natural forces at work in the world — most obviously duration and the weather. Drew describes his practice as “becoming the weather” — acting out the passing of time through the visual correlation of various natural processes like digging, burning and rusting metal. As he puts it, “There is definitely an alchemy that is involved at all levels. Because when I am rusting and burning things, I am using the weather and I am learning how to become the weather. There is never a time when there is not a natural force that I am either using or echoing.”

The wall sculptures and large installation piece displayed at Goodman reflect this use of natural materials subjected to the weather. These are in grid forms, but also three-dimensional works emerging in undulating waves from the wall, largely in wood, which will be subject to the passage of time and entropy. Drew has incorporated rust into his work as a material since the 1990s, and it is evident in many of the works on show here. Originally the rust was from pieces of scrap metal collected in New York’s streets, but then began to be produced in his studio.

While this is his first African solo exhibition, Drew exhibited in Senegal at the Biennale in the 1990s, subsequently producing work inspired by the history of the slave trade. But generally, his work evades easy sociopolitical categorisations. His abstractions are more deep-seated ruminations on the nature of time, entropy and decay and how these can be represented by everyday natural materials. The patterns that occur in his works, either in wave forms or in carefully ordered tableaus behind glass and in frames, remind us of the ephemerality of our existence, and are also an implicit call to think about the destruction we are wreaking on the natural world.

Drew is also well known for his complicity with viewers — never providing titles for his corpus, which he thinks will provide misleading interpretations. This is why he offers only a series of numbers for his works — the viewer must do the rest.

Leonardo Drew

Goodman Gallery,

163 Jan Smuts Ave,

Parkwood,

Johannesburg,

2193

Till 1 July