Margo Leavin Gallery

Margo Leavin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by William Leavitt titled Tensile Structures . On view from 24 March through 28 April (In observance of Passover and Easter both falling on the same weekend this year, Margo Leavin Gallery will be closed on Saturday, 7 April.), this will be Leavitt’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Leavitt’s new paintings and drawings take the dramatic sculptural forms of roller coasters and super-sized tents as their subject matter. Set against backgrounds of ordinary tract homes and local landscapes, these structures become fantastically strange and, through their curious juxtapositions, imbue these scenes with an air of the supernatural. Private domestic space stands in quiet contrast to the public theatricality of theme park architecture and the massive tented structures that recall carnivals and sports arenas. In this new body of work, the pairing of disparate scenes and elements, a hallmark of Leavitt’s practice, continues to engage.

William Leavitt’s work was the subject of the recent retrospective Theater Objects at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2011. He has also been included in a number of important museum exhibitions, such as It Happened at Pomona: Helene Winer at Pomona, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, 2011; State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, 2011; Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2011; In and Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009; Paris-Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2006; Made in California: 1900-2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2000; and Reconsidering the Object of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1996.