Devin Leonardi: The Source is the Goal

Altman Siegel is pleased to present Devin Leonardi’s second exhibition with the gallery. In a departure from his previous work, which was exclusively acrylic on paper, Leonardi will present an exhibition of exquisite, small-scale oil paintings on canvas.

Leonardi’s works are primarily figurative and take cues from classical painting traditions. They aim to subvert standard viewing by emphasizing an anonymity that Leonardi sees as the potential within photography to provide an image of the world whose details grow more diffuse with the passage of time. In order to highlight this concept, Leonardi bases his paintings on photographs from the 1850s to the 1880s attributed to artists as varied as Thomas Eakins, Oscar Rejlander and Lady Clementina Hawarden. In every case he has either edited down or re-combined these images into new compositions that he makes his own through oil paint, revealing something beyond their respective subjects by illuminating the nature of the photographic illusion itself.