FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LESLIE BAUM The Space Between (click here for images)

November 3 – December 30, 2006
Opening Reception: Friday, November 3 from 6-9 pm
NEW Gallery Hours: WEDNESDAY- Saturday 11am-5 pm
TONY WIGHT / BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery
119 N. Peoria St. Chicago IL 60607
T. 312-492-7261 F.312-492-6796 info@bodybuilderandsportsman.com Contact: Tony Wight
Press and photographic material available upon request.

TONY WIGHT / BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery is pleased to announce The Space Between, an exhibition of new oil paintings and watercolor drawings by Chicago based artist Leslie Baum. This will be Baum’s second solo showing at Tony Wight / Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery.

Leslie Baum’s new work is informed by the conflation of nature as configured within the zoo. A series of small watercolor studies reveal Baum’s observational experience, serving as a bridge between her large oil paintings and her direct experience of the zoo environment. Animals --geese, penguins, a monkey, a panda, and a black bear-- perch discreetly on the studies’ white page. Baum’s large oil paintings, ranging four to six feet in width, re-imagine the surrounding space as a vibrant, almost psychedelic interplay of shape, scale, color and texture.

Baum’s canvases are first bathed in thin, controlled washes of paint thereby creating the translucent, amorphous color fields of the paintings’ grounds. The gossamer fields contrast with the thickly painted opaque and outlined shapes, simplified and abstracted versions of the natural elements of landscape. Rocks and cliffs become cubic and rectangular prisms, trees and roots are described through swaths of intersecting lines. Animals from the zoo studies are inserted into the tension of these dramatic expansive environments. Although somewhat dwarfed by the pulsating color and monumental shapes of their surroundings, the animals are oddly commanding, ripe and inviting our exploration.

Baum says of this work, “The paintings are equivocal, after a fashion: they investigate opposing modes of painting without giving preference to one over its opposite: transparency vs. opacity, fluidity vs. control, figuration vs. abstraction, invitation vs. repellence. The tensions of these oppositional strategies and the resulting emotional climate they produce within the viewer are the paintings’ true subject.”

Leslie Baum received her BA from the University of Vermont in 1993 and spent 1991-92 studying at the Glasgow School of Art. Solo exhibitions include My Mountain, My Molehill at Tony Wight/Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery (2004), A Daytripper’s Diary and Leslie Baum, New Paintings, Jan Cicero Gallery (2002, 2001). Group exhibitions include: Associate Realms, Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco (2005), Private, CRG Gallery, New York (2004); New and Recent Work and Summer, Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery (2004, 2003); Here and Now, Chicago Cultural Center (2002); The Emerging Landscape, The Noyes Cultural Arts Center, Chicago (2001). Leslie Baum was named “The Best Emerging Artist in Chicago” in the August 2004 issue of Chicago Magazine. Baum’s work is also currently on view in Chicago at the River East Art Center as part of Land Escape, a group show curated by Joseph Tabet.