Biography
Leslie Roberts (b. 1957, Goldsboro, North Carolina; lives Brooklyn, New York) has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad for the past 30 years. Her highly-acclaimed first solo exhibition at the gallery, FYEO, took place in 2016 and was widely reviewed. She has also exhibited her work at esteemed venues such as Art in General, Brooklyn Museum, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Dam Stuhltrager Gallery, Davidson Contemporary, Hallwalls, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Lyons Wier Gallery, McKenzie Fine Art, Painting Center, Pierogi Gallery, PPOW Gallery, Rotunda Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, Swiss Institute, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among many others.

Roberts produced many of her new paintings during recent residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has also received awards from Pratt Institute, Yale University, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her work has been discussed in publications such as ArtFCity, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, dArt International, James Kalm Report, NY Arts Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, TimeOut London, and Two Coats of Paint. Roberts is a professor at Pratt Institute, where she teaches Foundation Light Color and Design. She holds an MFA from Queens College and a BA from Yale University.

Statement
My paintings translate words into visual language. These panels with texts and accompanying abstract structures might be called illuminated manuscripts of the everyday.

Written in these recent paintings are collections of ambient found language: fragments from street signs, junk mail, end user licensing agreements, email, labels, subway ads, receipts, newspapers, and instruction manuals. Transcripts of fine print from the relentless flow of information surrounding us are used to derive a personal abstract vernacular.

Each panel is a slate on which penciled and inked text and notations accompany resulting geometric configurations of acrylic gouache paint. I print columns of letters and code them into corresponding columns and rows of painted geometry. In some paintings the same text is coded in more than one way. Different systems and layerings of visual elements--color, mark, shape, division—yield crystalline structures, linear networks, and other abstract dialects.

These works originated with small studies on graph paper in my datebook, made while riding the subway. To escape my habits of composition, I played games with numbers, randomness, and, finally, words. The results led to work with a crazy logic, part text and part visual intensity, that I'm still pursuing after more than a decade.

About the paintings' texts:

Some texts document a journey or a particular place. Others are rosters of related fragments from disparate sources: instructions, guarantees, regulations, warnings. There are lists of acronyms, rules, book titles, artists, names of streets, and names of trees. These collected scraps from our language environment may be banal, poetic, nostalgic, ominous, or ironic.

It takes close looking to make out words from the lettered stacks. The paintings can be seen without being read. The texts are a kind of deep background, "fine print," like some of their actual sources. There is resonance for me in these texts. But I hope the works as a whole, with their regimented tangles of notation and paint, have a visual presence requiring no glossary.

Gallery Exhibitions
Twenty, June 24 - September 30, 2023

Leslie Roberts: HOW THINGS ARE, September 7 – October 26, 2019

Untitled (Summer), July 19 - August 24, 2019

Leslie Roberts: FYEO, September 10 - October 29, 2016

Interviews + Videos
Leslie Roberts and Cyrilla Mozenter: Where Did We Leave Off?, Two Coats of Paint, October 27, 2021

Leslie Roberts How Things Are at MINUS SPACE, James Kalm Report, September 9, 2019

Leslie Roberts: FYEO at MINUS SPACE, James Kalm Report, October 2, 2016

Catalogs / Books
Decoding Manhattan: Island of Diagrams, Maps, and Graphics, by Antonis Antoniou and Steven Heller, Published by Abrams, 2021 (Amazon)

New York Studio Conversations: Seventeen Women Talk About Art, by Stephanie Buhmann, 2016 (Amazon)

Web Site
www.leslierobertsart.com

Our Artsy Page
www.artsy.net/minus-space/artist/leslie-roberts

Social Media
Instagram