Michael Leonard: New Paintings & Drawings at Forum Gallery is the artist’s first New York exhibition in ten years. Leonard will exhibit a new body of exquisitely rendered figurative oil portraits and drawings. The exhibition offers the unique opportunity to follow the artist’s process as he explores his personal visual ideas from inception to completion.

This process culminates in intensive and provocative meditations on the human figure in transition: from clothed to nude, from still to motion. Each figure appears illuminated, glowing from within the canvas, each body’s softness carefully juxtaposed against the sharpness of the edges enclosing each image.

Several compositions appear more than once, with subtle alterations to the model’s pose or the artist’s color choice; this repetition of subjects offers rarely seen insight into the way the artist works with his models.

In her essay for the exhibition, Barbara S. Krulik writes:

The most important, captivating thing about these paintings and drawings is the content. Leonard reveres Degas, who held a discreet distance from his young ballerinas and bathers. Leonard replaces the dance studio or brothel with the changing room and keeps no distance from his subjects. … The male nudes are particularly powerful. They twist and turn in their cramped space so we almost feel the sinew in the tautness of the musculature. Dressing or disrobing, the models are caught in a personal activity that is rarely shared with strangers. The female nudes are much more delicately painted - softer - with a pearly smoothness that references Ingres. They are also caught in the process of intimate action.

Michael Leonard lives and works in London. He has been the subject of a solo exhibition at Yale University, New Haven, CT and a retrospective at the Gemeentemuseum, Arnhem, The Netherlands. Michael Leonard’s paintings and drawings are featured in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London; the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY; and the Seven Bridges Foundation, Greenwich, CT.