Leo Fine

Leo Fine is an emerging self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist working out of Gowanus, Brooklyn. He studied liberal arts and music at Brown University and The New School for a year each, before deciding to pursue art. Originally from San Francisco, he moved to New York City in 2020, where he has resided and developed his practice since then. He has exhibited his work most notably at the Brooklyn Museum as part of their “Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” from 2024 to 2025. Previously, he has also shown work in solo- and group-shows at Sweet Lorraine Gallery, and at the Art on Paper Fair in the Shoestring Press booth. ARTIST STATEMENT: Audre Lorde once said, “These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.” This quote drives my practice, with its sentiment of introspective obscurity surrounding the most vital aspects of experience, and the importance of our methods of self-examination. Contextualized within broader society, my work expands the collective imagination of queer art; beyond representation, queerness provides a life-long lens of questioning, giving art the potential to unravel the webs of power that act upon us (and which we unknowingly recreate). As metaphor for this existential exploration, my process meditates on repetition and pattern, across multiple mediums. My end product is dependent on a unique and personal process which echoes my psychological attachments and estrangements with the world — symbolizing the discovery of what lies outside tradition and refuses classification. I attempt to find a balance between control and freedom, an integration of unspoken questions and answers. I hope my work gives viewers a feeling of opportunity for unfamiliar truths to emerge.

Through methodical process and slow attention, my creative practice offers myself and my audience an open-ended temporal atmosphere where opportunity for unfamiliar truths emerges. I choose to work with rigid, exacting sculptural techniques, requiring development of a greater focus and creativity within material constraints. By prolonging the labor involved and approaching the work as craft, my process becomes an act of meditation, anchored by repetition of simple forms. Small, uncomplicated geometric ideas are iterated and gradually transformed into enveloping fields of pattern and texture. The work flouts standardized framing and categorizations, with fragile, open forms that recede and protrude in all directions. A recurring conflict between flatness and depth generates optical illusions, which require the viewer to linger in order to understand. Light and shadow echo through the forms and capture the audience in sensation, spurring an encounter with an ambiguous kind of reflection. The work inhabits a subconscious territory through abstraction, encouraging the viewer to experience it inwardly; when representative imagery is used, it is manipulated to strip the subject's recognizable features and draw focus to the piece's affect instead. Through this durational meditation, my work investigates quieter states of consciousness and introspection in search of hidden meaning and feeling.