Leslie Wayne utilizes paint to create astonishingly tactile, fabric-like simulacrums that challenge the viewer’s perception of material and form. Through her masterful use of trompe l’oeil (a French term meaning “to deceive the eye”), Wayne transforms the flat surface of the canvas into something that appears sculptural, textured, and dimensional. Thick folds, ripples, and layers of paint mimic the weight and movement of draped cloth, blurring the boundary between painting and sculpture. By pushing the medium beyond its traditional limitations, Wayne turns pigment into illusion, and surface into substance.

Wayne grew up in Southern California and studied visual arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She took a year off to live and work in Paris, and five years to live in Israel before moving to New York where she earned her BFA with honors in Sculpture at Parsons School of Design. She was an early member of 55 Mercer, one of New York’s first artist run cooperatives in SoHo, and following her second solo show there, joined Jack Shainman Gallery.

LESLIE WAYNE (b. 1953 in Landstühl, Germany) has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad and her work is in numerous public collections, including the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; la ColeccionJumex, Mexico City; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum Smithsonian Library, NYC; The Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, FL; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; the Davis Museum of Art, Wellesley, MA; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; and the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY, among others.

Throughout her career she has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2017), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2012), New York Foundation for the Arts (2018, 2006), Buhl Foundation for abstract photography (2004), New York State Council on the Arts Projects Residency (1993), Yaddo Artists Residency (1992), the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (1994) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1985). In 2017 she was awarded a commission from the New York CityMTA Arts and Design program to create windows for the Bay Parkway Station subway platform on the Culver (F) line in Brooklyn, NY.