Leslie Wayne

Leslie Wayne (b. 1953 in Landstühl, Germany; lives and works in New York, NY) manipulates the medium of painting by approaching oil paint as a sculptural material, often scraping, folding, cutting, collaging and building up her surfaces. Her work takes on three-dimensional forms through layering and varying textures and colors. The tactile quality of her work has often evoked geology and the forces of nature by approaching her subject matter through visual manifestations of physical forces: compression, subduction and morphogenesis, rather than pictures of nature in the traditional sense. Many of her works are shaped in ways that accentuate movement and instability, challenging the traditional view of painting by creating three-dimensional stand-ins for the objects they represent.

Throughout her career, Wayne has explored portals and thresholds, depicted in the abstract or pictorial, while some of her more recent work uses trompe l'oeil and verisimilitude to challenge viewers’ own perceptions. In What's Inside, a series from 2017-2018, she depicts containers, windows and shaped panels in exaggerated and skewed perspectives, blurring the lines between the reality of the painting as an object and the illusion of the image they represent. This is particularly true for her larger scale paintings as one envisions stepping across thresholds into imagined interiors. Wayne's closets, which can be thought of as hiding spots from the outside world as much as spaces for safekeeping, and her broken and boarded up windows, are meditations on the state of our society and the environment.