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Artist: Leoncillo
In collaboration with Galleria dello Scudo, Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Leoncillo and the Soul of Clay. The exhibition marks the first solo presentation of the artist in New York in more than three decades. Focusing on the radical body of sculpture Leoncillo created in the last ten years of his life from the late 1950s to the 1960s, the presentation honors the artist’s singular relationship to the ceramic medium—revealing how clay and terracotta acted not only as Leoncillo’s primary materials, but also as an eternal extension of the artist himself.
Among the most significant sculptors of the twentieth century, Leoncillo Leonardi—known as Leoncillo— worked with clay from childhood to his earliest days as an artist. During his career, he first created figurative ceramic sculptures, reflecting Baroque and Cubist influences, before turning in the late 1950s towards abstraction. The works he made from this point, until his untimely death at the age of fifty-two in 1968, portray the material essence of clay. For Leoncillo, it represented the ultimate embodied medium; “Clay is like my own flesh, an absolute process of identification (whose expressive prerequisites I know like the fingers of my hand, just as the choice of cracked surface alongside glossy surface is one of the coexistences that fill my days).”
His practice of sculpting with clay was essential and symbiotic; he positioned the medium as one that he suffused with life, and also derived life from. He wrote, “Clay of my clay, manmade material of mine, and yet metaphorically imbued with all that I have seen and loved, everything I have grown close to, clay metaphorically imbued with all that is within me...” He continued, “Clay becomes ‘our own’ material by virtue of the acts we perform both on and with it, acts that spring from a reaction intrinsic to our being, acts born of fury, tenderness, despair, prompted by the fact that we are alive, by all that we feel and see.”
Among the twelve historically significant sculptures featured in the exhibition are San Sebastiano nero (1962) and Tempo ferito II (1963), both last exhibited in New York in Leoncillo’s celebrated solo exhibition at Galleria Odyssia in 1965. San Sebastiano nero forms part of the San Sebastiano cycle the artist began in 1960, featuring abstract columnar sculptures of glazed and engobed terracotta. The work makes reference to Saint Sebastian, an early Christian martyr who was tied to a tree and shot with arrows as a punishment for his beliefs. Leoncillo had previously portrayed the subject in 1939, creating a figurative version of the saint in the round.
Tempo ferito, translating to “wounded time,” is one of two sculptures of this title Leoncillo created in 1963. The present work was included in the 1972 Venice Biennale. The artist remarked on the sculpture and the concept of wounded time, “The days are all unchanging, one after another.... The days accumulate, create a time, a packed cadence of both different and same. In their midst, a great fissure enters and gets lost among them. Like some ancient ruin, bricks tumble one beside the other, unexpectedly devoured by a scourge that renders them all undifferentiated.” Leoncillo and the Soul of Clay reveals a singular unity between artist and medium, with clay becoming the vessel for Leoncillo to expose the material’s truth as well as his own. “I am just someone living his life,” he said, “because at this point this work I do comes as naturally to me as breathing and living.”
Of the exhibition and collaboration, Dominique Lévy shares, “As a gallery, we have a commitment to Italian art and we are thrilled to work hand in hand with experts on the artist in Galleria dello Scudo.” The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring a new essay by art historian Enrico Mascelloni.
Leoncillo and the Soul of Clay is on view concurrently with Bacon / de Kooning, the first exhibition to place the figuration and abstraction of Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning in dialogue. Leoncillo too bridged figuration and abstraction in his work, commenting the relationship between the two when he reflected, “To me the great shock was Abstraction versus Figuration. That paralyzed me for years and years. I know that I can achieve, that an artist can achieve, through nonfigurative form, a powerful expressive intensity much like what can be attained through figurative art.”
About the Artist
Leoncillo Leonardi, later known by his first name Leoncillo, was born in Spoleto, Italy, on November 18, 1915. As a child, Leoncillo gravitated immediately to the ceramic medium and later studied sculpture at the Istituto d’Arte di Perugia and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. During his early career, he created neo-Baroque figurative works that referenced Greco-Roman mythology and Christian themes—as well as chromatic neo-Cubist sculptures inspired by the everyday. In 1957, Leoncillo experienced a period of artistic crisis that culminated in his break from the realist tradition. Turning to abstraction, he began sculpting works that expressed existential truths and established the materiality of clay as his foremost preoccupation. Leoncillo participated in numerous editions of the Venice Biennale, first in 1948, and then in 1950, 1952, 1954, and 1960; he was selected to represent Italy at the 34th Venice Biennale in 1968. On September 3, 1968, Leoncillo passed away unexpectedly in Rome. The following year in 1969, excerpts from his Piccolo diario (Little Diary) were published for the first time.
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