Leonardo Drew: Alchemy

Bruce Museum
November 28, 2025 – May 10, 2026

Dividing his time between Brooklyn, New York, and San Antonio, Texas, internationally renowned artist Leonardo Drew (American, b. 1961) is best known for his dynamic, abstract sculptures that simultaneously evoke order and chaos. Drew’s methodology is laborious, beginning with raw materials that he meticulously transforms in the studio. Wood, metal, canvas, cotton, rope, and other forms of debris are deftly manipulated in the artist’s hands, often through multilayered processes that mimic erosion and decay. In his monumental, immersive installations, Drew assembles these materials into dense constellations that harness a sense of unbridled energy, creating what the artist refers to as an “explosion.”

Drew’s intricately detailed works on paper also engage a form of alchemy, allowing the artist to explore the possibilities of varied materials, techniques, and compositions on a more intimate scale. Collaborating with master papermakers at Pace Paper in Brooklyn, New York, Drew initially created a series of monoprints using metal and wooden plates. He soon began to experiment with molds, from which he produced highly dimensional reliefs. The cast paper works have evolved in recent years into maquette-like forms, resembling sculptural assemblages or mosaics. Drew has increasingly tested the limits of the papermaking medium, using pigmented paper pulp as well as sand, string, calcium carbonate, and plaster paint chips. The introduction of color into his work was inspired by his travels to Jingdezhen, a center of historical porcelain production in China, which he first visited in 2015.

Featuring approximately twenty works on paper, all produced within the last two decades, Leonardo Drew: Alchemy highlights the material transformations—and accumulations—that are at the heart of the artist’s practice.

Leonardo Drew is known for creating reflective abstract sculptural works that play upon the dystopic tension between order and chaos, recalling Post Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past, as well as the plight of African Americans throughout U.S. history. One could find many meanings in his work, but ultimately the cyclical nature of life and decay can be seen in his grids of transformed raw material to resemble and articulate entropy and a visual erosion of time.

Drew’s natural talent and passion for art was recognized at an early age, first exhibiting his work at the age of 13. He went on to attend the Parsons School of Design and received his BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and art in 1985. His works have been shown nationally and internationally and are included in numerous public and private collections. Public institutions include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; and Tate, London, among others, as well as collaborating with Merce Cunningham on the production of “Ground Level Overlay.” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith describes his large reliefs as “pocked, splintered, seemingly burned here, bristling there, unexpectedly delicate elsewhere. An endless catastrophe seen from above. The energies intimated in these works are beyond human control, bigger than all of us.” He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.