Alfred Leslie
At Bruce Silverstein in New York
Alfred Leslie is a trend-setting, multitalented American artist. He was born in the Bronx in 1927, and after serving in World War II, became an Abstract Expressionist and achieved success and recognition in the 1950s. He also branched out into filmmaking, producing such underground classics as Pull My Daisy (1959) with Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac and The Last Clean Shirt (1964) with poet Frank O’Hara.
In 1962, he abruptly switched his painting style to realistic and figurative, presaging the Pop revolution and the work of such realist artists as Chuck Close, Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz. Of this change, Leslie said, “there was a point at which I realized that if my work was to develop and evolve, and if I was to mature as an artist, these figurative ideas could not be ignored, even though following them could seem to imply that I would be turning my back on the twentieth century, turning my back on my abstract achievement.”
Now in his late 80s, Leslie is pioneering once again. His most recent series of works are digitally painted and printed portraits of characters from literature and current fiction. He calls them “Pixel Scores,” and the series 50 Characters in Search of a Reader. A show of this work—and some classic portraits from the ’60s—“Alfred Leslie: The Toast Is Burning,” was at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York this fall. Here, PROVOKR presents some potent highlights.
