Anglim/Trimble is pleased to present our latest exhibition Wildlife by Leslie Bostrom.
Juxtaposing nature against the built environment, Leslie Bostrom’s works in Wildlife undermine the human/nature binary. Nature takes primacy in her paintings, foregrounded in urban landscapes with a vibrant slightly acidic color palette.
Bostrom paints flowers, birds, humans, dogs, trees, houses, highways, cars, airplanes and anything else that catches her attention. She compresses and plays with the space within and on the edges of the picture plain.
When starting a work, Bostrom first considers the paint; its thickness or thinness, color, brushstroke, blend and texture. She first conceives of the work as an abstraction, as an example, “lots of color with a big black form.”
As part of her working process, Bostrom makes small collages and watercolor studies to refine her ideas. When she has a direction that suggests an intriguing narrative, she starts the painting. If Bostrom needs more space than the canvas allows, she simply “adds on” another segment, usually pieces of plywood, to accommodate the text or imagery that the work requires.
In her quest to paint the most beautiful and provocative paintings she can, Leslie Bostrom tries to avoid clichés or deliberately planned narratives, and instead depends on a random amalgamation of objects and characters to create open-ended meanings.
Please join us for a reception on Saturday, July 13 from 4-6 pm in our second-floor gallery at Minnesota Street Project.
Wildlife is on view through Saturday, August 17.
Leslie Bostrom received her BA from the University of Maine, Orono, and her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Between undergraduate and graduate school, she worked as a master printer in San Francisco, specializing in intaglio.
Bostrom has taught drawing, painting, and printmaking at Brown University for 33 years. She has exhibited her work in solo shows in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Paul, Philadelphia, Seoul, South Korea, and Sydney AUS, and has been represented in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and the New Yorker. Her most recent solo show was at the Main Gallery at University of Rhode Island, where she exhibited large paintings that were “combination” images on stretched canvas and sheets of plywood. Bostrom is interested in the interaction of words and images in painting and for most of her career she has been making works that engage political topics such as environmental degradation, human migration, feminism, and LGBQT issues. Her most recent paintings feature birds that she has seen while pursuing one of her other passions- birding.
Bostrom has lectured about her work at over 30 universities and museums, most recently at Nanjing University in Nanjing, China.
