Leoncillo and the Soul of Clay at Lévy Gorvy Dayan

From November 4 to December 19, 2026, Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Leoncillo and the Soul of Clay on the first floor of its townhouse at 19 East 64th Street. It is the first New York solo show of the Italian sculptor Leoncillo Leonardi in more than thirty years. The gallery organizes it with Galleria dello Scudo, and the curators are Enrico Mascelloni, Dominique Lévy and Massimo Di Carlo.

Leoncillo was born in Spoleto in 1915 and took to clay as a child. He studied sculpture at the Istituto d'Arte di Perugia and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. His early work included neo-Baroque figurative pieces drawn from Greco-Roman mythology and Christian subjects, along with colorful neo-Cubist sculptures inspired by everyday life. A crisis in 1957 led him to break with the realist tradition and move toward abstraction, and from then on the material nature of clay was his main concern. He showed at the Venice Biennale from 1948 onward and was chosen to represent Italy at the 34th edition in 1968. He died unexpectedly in Rome that September, at fifty-two.

The show concentrates on the last decade of his life, from the late 1950s to the 1960s. Twelve historically significant sculptures in terracotta, engobes and glazes are on view. Their surfaces set cracked areas beside glossy ones, a pairing the artist described as part of his daily life. He called clay "like my own flesh," and wrote of it as a material shaped by fury, tenderness and despair.

Two works anchor the presentation. San Sebastiano nero (1962) belongs to the San Sebastiano cycle he began in 1960, a series of abstract columnar forms in glazed and engobed terracotta that refer to the martyred saint. He had made a figurative, in-the-round Saint Sebastian in 1939. Tempo ferito II (1963), whose title means "wounded time," is one of two sculptures of that name from the year. It was included in the 1972 Venice Biennale. Both were last shown in New York in his 1965 solo exhibition at Galleria Odyssia.

A catalogue accompanies the show. It includes a new essay by Mascelloni and the first complete English translation of Leoncillo's Piccolo diario, which Galleria dello Scudo and Skira published in an expanded, illustrated edition in 2018. The gallery is also showing Bacon / de Kooning at the same time. Leoncillo likewise moved between figuration and abstraction, and said that abstract form could carry an expressive force equal to figurative art.