Leslie Baum

In this new project, Leslie Baum harvests images from the internet of modern painting for all the best bits. The fragments she finds most useful become low-res print outs — then the real work begins. These image fragments are rough and retain only the most graphic visual information about the original; but that’s OK. Cobbled together with selections from a rich personal painting history, she constructs her own restless Frankenstein’s monster. The work is slippery; try as she may, she can’t be wholly faithful to the original. Imperfections compound. Attempts at faithfulness fail, and from these failures uneasy paintings emerge, referencing the familiarity of the original while replacing it with sensibilities, biases, and quirks that are distinctly her own.

Leslie Baum studied at the Glasgow School of Art and received her BA from the University of Vermont. Since then she has shown her work nationally and internationally including exhibitions in New York at CRG, in San Francisco at Gregory Lind Gallery, in Chicago at the Tony Wight Gallery, in Rome at Barone Odom Gallery, and in Pyung Teak, South Korea at the Sosabul Art Expo. Her drawings are in the Art institute of Chicago’s permanent collection and her paintings can be found in numerous private collections. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum and Art in America among many other publications. She has been artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, and was nominated for the Richard H. Driehaus Award for emerging artists in 2005.