My Friend Leslie

New work: Bedford Square by My Friend Leslie

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My Friend Leslie’s latest work, Bedford Square operates in that fertile interstice between biomorphism and linguistic deferral, where form insists but never coheres, where signification hovers like a mirage. Two figures,one a sprawling vermilion, the other a more compact lavender,occupy the white ground with an ambivalence that resists both compositional resolution and narrative absorption. What emerges is not an image in the conventional sense, but an ontological problem staged through colour and contour.

The larger red form, with its oscillations between curve and jut, suggests the bodily without ever descending into figuration. It recalls the residual anthropomorphism of Arp’s early reliefs, yet the crisp flatness of its surface pushes it toward the digital, toward a vectorized aesthetic that displaces tactility with pure sign. In contrast, the lavender fragment reads as a supplement or trace, invoking Derrida’s notion of the parergon,that which both belongs to and exceeds the frame, marking the instability of inside and outside, figure and ground.

The faint inscription “Bedford Square” in the corner functions less as a title than as an epistemic intrusion. Here, language sutures itself to abstraction, demanding that we think the work as situated,within geography, within history,while simultaneously refusing to clarify its relation. Is the image a map? A psychogeographic dérive? Or is the textual residue merely a destabilizing gesture, reminding us that no abstraction is ever pure, that every form is haunted by context?

My Friend Leslie’s abstraction, then, is not an escape from the world but a reconfiguration of it,an abstraction that acknowledges its own impurity, its semiotic leakage. It is tempting to read the crimson figure as presence and the lavender as absence, but such binaries collapse in the act of viewing. What persists is tension: between assertion and withdrawal, legibility and opacity, surface and depth.

In the end, My Friend Leslie situates themselves in dialogue not only with the formal histories of modernism (Matisse, Kelly, Arp) but also with the post-structural suspicion of closure. The work is less an image to be looked at than a proposition to be inhabited,a reminder that abstraction’s vitality lies not in what it depicts, but in how it perpetually defers depiction.

Pimlico Wilde Welcomes Conceptual Artist My Friend Leslie

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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.

Reflections on the famous New York exhibition of My Friend Leslie

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In the spring of 2019, My Friend Leslie staged a widely discussed and critically divisive solo exhibition at the Fenwick Museum of Art entitled Apparitions in the Civic Realm. Heralded by some as “a palimpsest of the post-liberal imaginary” and dismissed by others as “deliberately inaccessible,” the exhibition marked the artist’s most ambitious and conceptually rigorous foray into institutional space to date.

Comprising three floors of minimal yet emotionally charged interventions, Apparitions resisted the conventional logic of spatial coherence or narrative progression. Visitors entered through a narrow vestibule coated in matte legal blue,a hue My Friend Leslie later identified as “borrowed from obsolete zoning maps of Queens.” Within this space, wall-mounted QR codes led to intentionally dead or redirected links, a gesture that many interpreted as a meditation on epistemic instability and the disorientation of digital archival systems. This introductory environment established a central concern of the exhibition: the erosion of legibility under late bureaucratic capitalism.

Perhaps the most discussed component of the show was the tripartite installation Public Secrets (2018), which occupied the museum’s fifth floor. Here, My Friend Leslie juxtaposed deaccessioned urban planning models from the 1960s with a series of hand-transcribed psychiatric intake forms sourced,according to the museum’s label,from a now-defunct therapeutic community in upstate New York. The forms, scrawled in delicate graphite on vellum, were layered over repurposed municipal signage reading “No Loitering,” “Authorized Personnel Only,” and the ambiguous “Subject to Inspection.” The cumulative effect was one of ethical vertigo: viewers found themselves implicated in a system of quiet surveillance even as they were invited to empathize with its casualties.

As critic LaDonna Merriweather noted in July, My Friend Leslie’s practice here enacted “a form of conceptual counter-archives, wherein personal testimony is not revealed but displaced, its legibility contingent on the viewer’s own complicity.”¹

Equally striking was the series of time-based performances that occurred without formal scheduling or announcement. Entitled Unscheduled Lives, these involved uniformed performers,hired through a temp agency,wandering the museum reciting fragments of local administrative code in affectless tones. Their presence, indistinguishable at times from security staff, troubled the boundaries between art, labour, and institutional authority. The performances’ refusal to “stage” themselves was emblematic of My Friend Leslie’s larger refusal to provide resolution or spectacle.

A subtler, yet no less incisive work was Indexical Drift (2017,18), a set of 24 microfilm viewers arranged in a grid across a dimly lit gallery. Inside each, viewers could peruse fragments of letters, obituaries, and inventory manifests,all anonymized and redacted beyond decipherability. The flickering of the film loops created a durational hum, suggestive of bureaucratic fatigue and archival entropy. It is a testament to My Friend Leslie’s conceptual precision that these pieces conveyed so much through so little: a kind of anti-monumentality charged with quiet defiance.

Reception of the exhibition was sharply polarized. The New Liverpool Times praised My Friend Leslie’s “brutal subtlety” and her capacity to “aestheticize absence without romanticising it,”² while others accused the work of “aestheticized opacity verging on institutional satire.”³ Yet even detractors conceded the show’s intellectual rigor and undeniable affective power.

My Friend Leslie, in keeping with her practice, made no public comment on the exhibition and refused all interviews. In place of a press release, the gallery issued a statement reading simply: “The artist has nothing to add.”

What remains of Apparitions in the Civic Realm is not a set of objects, but a set of conditions: a destabilized visitor, a murky authority, a network of disavowed speech acts. Like much of My Friend Leslie’s work, the exhibition will resist traditional forms of remembrance, and perhaps that is its most enduring gesture.

¹ LaDonna Merriweather, “Outtakes from the Civic Archive,” October, no. 189 (Fall 2024): 66.

² Holland Cotter, “The Absences Speak Louder Than Words,” The New York Times, April 14, 2024.

³ Alex Greenberger, “What’s She Hiding? Conceptual Obfuscation at the Whitney,” Artforum, May 2024.