Basic Info
Name: Leslie Roberts
Country of Origin: US
Website: https://leslierobertsart.com/home.html
Description
biography provided by the artist:
Leslie Roberts (born 1957, Goldsboro, NC) makes paintings driven by color, language, and self-devised rules. She has exhibited in the US and abroad, at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, Minus Space, Marlborough Gallery, 57W57Arts, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, McKenzie Fine Art, Markel Fine Arts, Pierogi, and PPOW in New York City the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); the Wellin Museum (Clinton, NY); and the Hafnarborg Museum (Hafnarfjördur, Iceland.) She received 2024 grants from the Pollock Krasner and Gottlieb Foundations. Other awards include Yale’s John Courtney Murray Fellowship for independent work abroad. Residencies include Yaddo, Dora Maar House, Ucross, Ragdale, Monson Arts, Willapa Bay AIR, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Skowhegan. Roberts holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from Queens College, CUNY. She is Professor Emerita at Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
statement about the work provided the artist:
Leslie Roberts translates ephemeral language into color abstraction, in works that are diagrams of their own making. Using self-devised rules, she maps handwritten words into algorithmic structures of ink, pencil, and acrylic gouache.
Roberts collects fragments from the flow of information through our lives and our screens. She sorts her notes into lists, and transcribes them in columns on slate-like gessoed panels. Each panel contains a list. The letters of each entry on that list (word, phrase, or sentence, as the case may be) are mapped along numbered and lettered X and Y axes, using a given rule and color for each entry. On some panels, the same text is diagrammed twice, using the same colors, but applying different rules. Varying systems involve lines, shapes, clusters of dots, or layers of wash, resulting in generative forms that can recall digital code, ancient glyphs, woven textiles, and musical scores.
Some paintings’ lists document a journey or place. Others are mismatched lexicons of contemporary vernacular: rosters of disparate instructions, acronyms, text messages, headlines, or other scraps of found language. The writing and notations are a resonant fine print, integral to the optical systems they produce.
