June Leaf: Thought is Infinite

June Leaf paints in the fantastical tradition of Bosch, Goya and the Surrealists

June Leaf’s extraordinary body of work–one built over nearly seven decades–belongs within a long tradition of visionary figures, from William Blake and Francisco Goya to James Ensor and Odilon Redon. Like these innovative predecessors, and incorporating elements of both Expressionism and Surrealism, Leaf infuses representational imagery with an intense subjectivity and personal symbolist vision. She does so through an extraordinary approach to and facility with materials, often combining mediums and matter in unorthodox ways.

Leaf’s exhibition at the Whitney and this accompanying comprehensive publication include drawings from every decade of her career, as well as a selection of sculptures and paintings, in order to elucidate the migration and cross-referencing of motifs and techniques from one medium to the other. In an immersive installation, the viewer perceives how the artist’s studio space intersects with her extraordinarily rich imagination and deeply personal, invented world in which fiction and reality indistinguishably merge.

June Leaf was born in Chicago in 1929. She began her artistic career in the 1940s, studying at the Chicago Art Institute and the New Bauhaus Institute of Design. In 1958, Leaf was awarded a Fulbright to study art in Paris. In 1960, she moved to New York. Her drawings, paintings and sculptures have been widely collected and are in many museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Leaf has received two honorary doctoral degrees, one from DePaul University in Chicago and one from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada.