Leonardo Drew

Ubiquity II

South London Gallery
May 30 – September 7, 2025

Artist Leonardo Drew takes over the SLG’s main gallery with a new immersive sculptural installation.  Known for his explosive sculptural works, this is Leonardo Drew’s first solo exhibition in a London institution. He creates reflective abstract pieces that play on the tension between order and chaos. Transforming and eroding materials by hand in the studio, he explores the cyclical nature of life and decay.

Drew’s process is meditative and involves repetitive labour to create sculptures and large-scale installations. He says: “My work and my life are not separate. They are the same thing”.  “I don’t work with found objects because there is already a history embedded in that material,” he explains. “For me, I need to go through the rigours of touching it, living it, ….become the weather.” 

At the SLG, a new site-specific work will cover the walls and floor of the main gallery space.  Fragments of wood are distressed, as though they have been through extreme weather events, natural disasters or, in Drew’s words, “acts of God”. 

Drew refrains from attaching specific meaning to each work, preferring to title pieces numerically so the viewer can engage directly with the  installation and discover a multitude of experiences within it. 

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.

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