 Winter New York Cityscape from The Four Seasons |
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 Acrobat Cups I from the Bread & Circuses show |
 Acrobat Cups II from the Bread & Circuses show |
 Acrobat Cups III from the Bread & Circuses show |
Gwyneth Leech has participated in two group shows at Village West: The Four Seasons show in Spring/Summer 2017, and the Bread & Circuses show in Winter 2015.
From 2010 to 2015, Gwyneth Leech painted regularly from the window of her 13th floor studio on West 39th Street in New York City, which had a panoramic view north over Midtown Manhattan. The light shifted hourly, throwing up tantalizing reflections of buildings within buildings and revealing dramatic weather effects. Over the last two years the construction of a 42 storey building, just a stone's throw from her window, consigned much of the view to memory, but in turn became the subject of new artwork.
Since 2015, Leech has become increasingly engrossed by the rapid physical changes occurring in midtown Manhattan where she lives. In ink drawings and oil paintings, she has documented construction projects from West 51st Street to the West 30's, recording the incremental yet rapid stages of the high rise building process. The northern loop of the High Line Park near West 34th Street is a favored vantage point from which she has been painting the massive crane-studded construction site of the Hudson Yards as a whole new neighborhood takes shape. Leech exhibited her first series of construction paintings and drawings at the offices of Sciame Construction LLC in the Fall of 2016.
Leech has exhibited her drawings, paintings and installations across the United States and the United Kingdom in a wide variety of museum, commercial gallery, public art and alternative spaces. She is well known for her artwork on used coffee cups which she exhibited widely as site specific installations, starting in 2011 in the Window Space for Public Art on West 39th Street in New York City's Garment District. Her presence at work in the window was a significant part of the project.
In the fall of 2011, the cup project transferred to the Flatiron Prow Artspace, 23rd and Broadway, NYC. The artist was in residence working in public five days a week from September 2011 to February 2012, resulting in a final collection of 850 drawings and paintings on her used coffee cups and a feature article in the New York Times. Subsequently, "Drawings 1-655" were included in "Luxuriant Refuse" at the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Art, Spring, TX in 2012. In September 2013, "365: A Year in Cups", a window installation for Anthropologie Regent Street, was a highlight of the London Design Festival.
Leech went on to create site-specific cup installations for City Without Walls Gallery in Newark, NJ, Concepto Gallery, Hudson, NY, and in New York City for No Longer Empty, Westbeth Gallery, Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan College and for the Susan Teller Gallery.
Prior projects include a series of alternative family portraits in oils called Perfect Families which was first shown in a New York City commercial gallery in 2006, toured a variety of community and alternative art spaces, and traveled to the Southwest Minnesota State University Art Museum.
Leech received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, and a BFA and Post Graduate DA from Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, UK. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, including several Scottish Arts Council awards, a University of Colorado's President's Fund Grant, an Elizabeth Greenshields Memorial Award and a Thouron Fellowship. Leech's artwork resides in important private and public collections.
For more information, please visit gwynethleech.com.