Paul Thiebaud Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of the Estate of Dennis Leon (1933-1998) and the gallery’s first exhibition of the artist’s works. On view starting May 17th, Dennis Leon: Collage, pastels, and sculpture 1975-1990 will have its celebratory reception on Saturday, June 7th, from 3-5 pm with remarks at 3:30 pm. Featuring a monumental collage, six pastels of different sizes, and four intimately scaled, unique cast bronze sculptures, each work conveys Leon’s interest in the landscape and his desire to intervene in the land to make his artistic mark. The exhibition will be on view through July 3, 2025.

An important member of the Land Art movement in the United States, Dennis Leon’s interventions in the natural environment were distinctly different in their intention and execution from those of his contemporaries, including Agnes Denes, Andy Goldsworthy, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, and Robert Smithson. Leon would spend hours studying a site before making his mark on the land, creating drawings in pastel and collage to visualize himself in the space and how it might look. Leon’s site specific works in the land could be as simple as inserting a series of painted wooden dowels into the ground along a hillside, or entail the creation of bronze and/or textual elements that were then integrated into the site to appear as if they had always been there.

His early engagements in the late 1960s and early 1970s were mostly guerilla actions that appeared without warning or sanction in the hills, wild spaces, and marginal areas of the San Francisco Bay Area. The works would remain in place until wind, water, or human hands disrupted them, sometime only hours after they were completed. Leon sought to bring together the nuance of the observed, the constructed, the acted upon, and the evolved in each of his works. As his reputation grew, Leon’s installations began to be commissioned for both public and private spaces, one of the most significant being Untitled, which was installed at Oliver Ranch in 1993. Parallel to the creation of his installations, Leon mounted numerous gallery and museum exhibitions of his paintings, drawings, and collages paired with his bronze and wood sculptures across the United States until his passing. Many of these works were related to his site interventions, though there are numerous series Leon created that are independent of them.