Leslie Wayne

B. 1953, Landstuhl, Germany

Leslie Wayne was born in Germany and grew up in Los Angeles. Following two years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a year in Paris and five years in Israel, she moved to New York in 1982 and transferred to Parsons School of Design where she earned her BFA in Sculpture with Honors. Largely informed by her identification with the light, colors and tactile sensibilities of the West Coast, Wayne’s work intersects painting, sculpture, abstraction, and representation to create a direct and intimate experience of the world around her. Wayne has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad and has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2018, 2006), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2017), the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2012), the Buhl Foundation (2004), the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (1994), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1985).

Wayne has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 1989 and lives and works in New York City.

Leslie Wayne and Durham Press have completed two new editions, the artist’s first collaborations with the Press since 2003. The works, which combine relief and silkscreen, depict broken, boarded-up windows, presenting enigmatic meditations on artistic illusionism and urgent contemporary issues.

Known primarily for three-dimensional and irregularly shaped abstract paintings, Wayne in recent years has begun to apply these techniques to representational subjects. These works portray architecture, furniture, and everyday things in trompe l’oeil, including storage shelves in her studio, cracked-open closet doors, ladders, and derelict windows. For her new editions with Durham Press, Wayne situates the viewer as if they are standing just outside a seemingly abandoned home but unable to see in. Each print centers on a solitary window, surrounded by wooden siding, with the glass shattered and the opening covered from the interior. Printed wood-grain textures cover the frames and plywood, adding an element of verisimilitude to the works that contrast with their otherwise flattened, stylized surfaces.

Windows, saturated with metaphors of providing views of the world, have been a recurring theme in art of the last century—from René Magritte’s surrealist images to Gerhard Richter’s Shadow Paintings, softened takes on the modernist grid. Robert Delaunay’s series Windows on the City illuminate the ways in which his home, Paris, was changing. Wayne is a New Yorker, and her windows are charged with associations: among them, an infamous policing strategy and a city recovering from 2012’s destructive Hurricane Sandy. Indeed, in the latter case, her windows could be almost anywhere, as natural disasters are occurring globally at an alarming rate.

For Wayne, however, these works don’t necessarily evoke doom. Just as windows are thresholds between two worlds, her prints reflect, in a critical moment, on the nature of reality and illusion, inevitability and potential. As the artist stated, “The idea of a broken window is also an invitation for some sort of renewal. A window can be fixed, new histories can be made.”

Not Forgotten 1 and 2 are printed in editions of 25 and are available directly through Durham Press. For more information on these works, or about previous pieces that Wayne has produced with Durham Press, please contact sales@durhampress.com.

Leslie Wayne

Viewing rooms

Leslie Wayne | Not Forgotten 1 & 2

Leslie Wayne | Here and There Sculpture

B. 1953, Landstuhl, Germany

Leslie Wayne

Further images