Leonardo Drew

Goodman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Leonardo Drew, featuring a striking new series of eight recently created wall sculptures and six new works on paper, collectively crafted from wood, glass and painted plaster. Running concurrently with Drew’s first institutional solo exhibition at the South London Gallery, this presentation further solidifies his presence in the city. Through his engagement with material, Drew continues his exploration of form, texture and spatial dialogue.

Renewal, decay, fragmentation and reconfiguration are central to Leonardo Drew’s practice. Using hand-weathered raw materials—washed, burnt, broken and reassembled—his works carry a history embedded in their form. Everyday and industrial objects retain traces of their original structure, revealing the tension between destruction and regeneration. Through nonlinear compositions, Drew embraces disorder and disintegration as part of a continuous cycle of interpretation. In his largely monochrome works, colour becomes physical rather than purely visual—another material shaped by time and process.

Through abstraction, Drew’s sculptures offer a vast repertoire of imagery. Works such as Number 440, Number 441, and Number 444 are dense and layered compositions that feature geometric formations — the repetition of squares that collectively form a larger square gives the works a structured, grid-like presence. Conceptually, the work alludes to entropy—not as a direct depiction of order and chaos, but as an undercurrent accentuating the fragility of form and the possibility of transformation. Crisscrossed ruins, tessellated fragments, and broken remnants recur throughout, reflecting an assemblage process that is both methodical and intuitive. Defined by open forms, asymmetry, and subtle gradations in colour, scale and texture, the works reveal a delicate balance between structure and unpredictability.