At the entrance to Leonardo Drew’s current solo show at Galerie Lelong is a huge, ten-foot-high grid of panels, each hosting a rich abundance of fragments, yet this towering, orderly artwork is overwhelmed by the dynamic chaos of a floor-to ceiling installation in the main gallery beyond. The materials – wood, plaster and paint – appear to be weathered fragments from a natural disaster but are in fact deliberately distressed and arranged in clusters around the gallery’s two main columns. In his urge to reinvent, Drew has reused elements from previous installations – projects for Art Basel in ’22 and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in ’23 – to respond to the specifics of Galerie Lelong’s industrial-architecture-turned-white-cube by banishing its austerity and taking over the space. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 19th).
