Leemour Pelli is an American artist living and working in New York City. She is primarily a painter and she also makes sculpture, works on paper, installation, prints, and photography.[1][2][3]
Pelli's work resembles medical imagery and x-rays[6] in the way she depicts anatomy[7] and the organs of the body, including the heart, rib cages, and lungs by seeing through the figure itself.[8] Distorted human figures appear with enlarged ribcages and hearts, overlapping lungs, and other anatomical organs such as intestines.[9] According to curator Robin Reisenfeld, Pelli's works use "anatomical and skeletal parts as a means to give physical presence to intangible emotional states and allude to the porous border between inner and outer states of reality."[10]
Lisa Turvey writes in her Artforum review of Pelli's 2008 exhibition at Daneyal Mahmoud Gallery, which included paintings and sculpture, that Pelli's work is a "rumination on the life force as pitted against the certainties of bone and death."[6] Her figures are shown in heightened states of emotion, solitude, love and connection through saturated color and gesture of the brushwork.[11][12] Turvey continues “she uses an ontological bait and switch of representing skeletons, parts and whole, as animate entities trying to commune with one another. This manifests itself in...'transferlike smudges'."[6]
Poetry and literature are a source of inspiration for Pelli's work.[13] She has cited the writing and ideas of Robert Frost,[14] Samuel Beckett,[15] Ted Hughes' Crow poems,[6] and others[8] as being influences on her work.[13] Pelli develops personas and narratives from these writers' work and her titles are often references this.[13]
Pelli's use of washes and transparent layered color are juxtaposed with dense marks.[16]Barry Schwabsky writes in a review of her work in The New York Times in 2000 "The color is soft and diaphanous in feeling, and yet the paint has been laid on thickly in blunt horizontal strokes. These color fields manage to be both atmospheric and obdurate at once."[16]
Pelli's work is the public collection of the Flint Institute of Art in Flint, Michigan.[17]
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