Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Mark Leonard: Common Threads. This selection of paintings provides a comprehensive view of Leonard’s artistic development throughout his career and highlights his unique synthesis of intellectual and emotional approaches to painting. From the artist’s recent works to some of his earliest, created as he first began training as a painter, Leonard has retained the same fundamental methodology: mining a timeless vocabulary of recurring geometric motifs to give material shape to the pleasures and perils of human experience.
The woven forms, twisted ropes, and lustrous spheres that appear, withdraw, and re-emerge in Leonard’s works throughout the decades connect them across time and narrative concerns. The orderly arrangement of their elemental structures supplies a logical framework for the underlying emotive content of these paintings. The joy and sorrow of loving and losing another person are inextricably intertwined in the warp and weft of Leonard’s Weaving series. In Prometheus and Semele, the eponymous mythological figures endure their tragic fates, perpetually fixed in place in the form of atom-like spherical distillates. Ebullient orbs and flickering rectangular sequences of color capture the sensual delights of classical music, while Leonard’s Still Life and Constable Landscape series pay geometric homage to the artistic lineage of the Old Masters.
In his recent Catenary Curve series, Leonard constructs portraits of interpersonal connections through its namesake geometric structure. He associates the shape, which is produced by the effect of gravity on a hanging chain supported at both ends, with the mutually anchored linkages between two individuals. These curves convey the essence of the powerful, intangible bridge between entangled entities.
Leonard’s earliest paintings were created in the 1970s, before he embarked on a long and distinguished career as a preeminent paintings conservator and began utilizing conservation materials and techniques in his own artwork. They bear the marks of a young artist wrestling with the lifelong undertaking of constructing a personal and creative identity. Expressed in interlocking diamonds, triangles, and trapezoids, they create passageways and edifices that invert and transform with the eye’s changing focus.
Mark Leonard earned a multi-disciplinary Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art, Art History, and Chemistry from Oberlin College, and Master’s degrees in both Art History and Art Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Leonard first worked as a restorer for The Metropolitan Museum of Art before spending 26 years at The J. Paul Getty Museum, with 12 of those years as the Head of Paintings Conservation. In 2012 he was invited to become the first Chief Conservator at the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2017, he returned to working full-time as an independent artist.
