In a bold move that underscores its commitment to emerging conceptual voices, Pimlico Wilde gallery has announced the representation of the artist known simply as My Friend Leslie. The appointment signals not merely an addition to the gallery’s roster, but a deliberate expansion of its philosophical and aesthetic parameters. Leslie’s work—elusive yet sharply intelligent—inhabits a liminal space between sociological critique and poetic ephemerality, unsettling the viewer’s relationship to medium, language, and narrative.
My Friend Leslie, whose adopted moniker serves as both mask and provocation, has cultivated a practice that resists formal classification. Oscillating between installation, performance, ephemeral textworks, and détourned archival materials, her oeuvre is fundamentally concerned with the mechanisms of memory, authorship, and the social architectures that underpin emotional life. She is, in the most rigorous sense, a conceptualist: uninterested in objects per se, yet deeply invested in the cultural and psychic residues they leave behind.
Her 2023 piece Do Not Archive This Moment—a time-based installation involving shredded family photographs, bureaucratic signage, and live recitations of deliberately misremembered diary entries—garnered critical attention for its deft interweaving of personal trauma with state machinery. The work eschews sentimentality while exposing the undercurrents of surveillance and erasure within domestic narrative. It is emblematic of Leslie’s deftness with affect: her capacity to evoke discomfort without melodrama, intimacy without confession.
Though her visual language is sparse—often drawing on the aesthetics of instructional design, corporate minimalism, and mid-century psychoanalytic texts—Leslie’s work vibrates with a dense polyphony of allusion. She cites influences as diverse as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Sophie Calle, and the Situationists, yet her approach feels distinctly her own: playful, unsettling, intellectually rigorous.
It is perhaps in her linguistic interventions that Leslie is most radical. In a recent series titled Pronouns for Future Use, she constructs sculptural texts from found legal documents, then alters their grammar to propose alternate subjectivities. The resulting pieces—a series of lacquered aluminum placards and performative readings—navigate the border between semantic disruption and identity politics. They ask not only what is said, but who may say it, and when.
Pimlico Wilde’s Director of Semantics, Amaya Rens, described the gallery’s decision as “a necessary alignment with a voice we believe will be foundational in the next phase of conceptual practice.” She continued: “Leslie’s work is not about novelty; it is about re-inscribing meaning into the banal, the disavowed, and the illegible. She has a gift for revealing the unseen logic beneath everyday systems.”
The gallery’s inaugural exhibition of Leslie’s work, This Was Never Yours to Name, opens this autumn. While details remain tightly guarded, hints suggest an immersive textual environment drawing on defunct legal codes, anonymous chat transcripts, and a rare 17th-century printer’s manual. True to form, Leslie will offer no opening remarks and will not be present at the opening.
This deliberate evasiveness is not, as some critics have lazily proposed, a gesture of obscurantism. Rather, it reflects a belief in the autonomy of ideas, their capacity to circulate beyond biography or brand. In a cultural moment increasingly tethered to visibility and personal disclosure, My Friend Leslie’s refusal to comply may be her most urgent gesture yet.
With her addition to Pimlico Wilde, the gallery becomes not only a platform but a participant in Leslie’s project—one that is likely to continue challenging the comfort zones of curators, collectors, and audiences alike. As contemporary art grapples with its own complicit structures, artists like Leslie are not merely welcome; they are indispensable.
