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Design for Life

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 Design for Life

Leslie Wayne
Printmaking
2018

Discovery Hall, Fifth Floor

Contemporary artist Leslie Wayne, born in Germany, raised in California, and now based in New York, is known for her innovative approach to texture, color, and form. Wayne works with a variety of mediums - paintings, prints, works on paper, and photography - and often combines sculpture and painting into “sculptural paint creations.” Whether she paints wood, nails, or rags in her 3D sculptural pieces or paints a canvas with vibrant colors in a heavy impasto, Wayne’s focus on texture and color are the foundational elements of work. 
 
Leslie Wayne manipulates the medium of painting and the look of her prints, often times scraping, folding, cutting and building up the surfaces. Her work takes on three-dimensional forms with layering, varying textures and colors. The tactile quality of her work evokes the experience of geology and natural phenomena. “My relationship to landscape is rooted in memory, in the light, colors and geography of the West, so here, in the middle of midtown Manhattan, I approach the subject more as an opportunity to depict visual manifestations of physical forces: compression, subduction, morphogenesis, rather than pictures of nature in the traditional sense. Many of the paintings are shaped in ways that accentuate movement and instability”.
 
Wayne received her BFA from The Parsons School of Design in 1984, and her BA in Creative Studies and Painting from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1973. Wayne’s work is include in various public collections such as the Birmingham Museum of Art Alabama, the Corcoran Gallery of Art Washington DC. The Portland Museum of Art Oregon, the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art Florida, the Neuberger Museum of Art New York, La Coleccion Jumex Mexico, and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain France. Leslie Wayne was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2016.