American artist Leonardo Drew seems to have destroyed the South London Gallery. Upon entering, the classically proportioned, late-19th century gallery appears to now be a bomb site, but one in which exploded pieces are uncannily trapped in a motionless moment. Each side of the room, dark wood shards seem to be trapped mid-eruption, some emerging into slagheap piles, some thrown across the space and up against the crisp white walls.

This apparent pause in time invites the visitor to navigate the space, at first trying not to stand on fragments scattered across the floor before giving in to the inevitable unavoidability of stepping on some. Getting closer, the pieces of wood all seem to reveal some kind of patina of history or place, but these are not all places of South London or this building, but instead a kind of chaotic glossary of other places, stories, and architectures.




When making new work, such as this all-encompassing sculptural intervention, Drew re-uses and recycles pieces of previous projects. Pieces here on the walls in Camberwell may previously have had lives on gallery walls, floors, or ceilings in any of the commercial galleries or institutions the artist has presented in over a career that began with an interest in comics, before discovering Picasso, before stepping away from drawing and painting to embark on sculptural experiments with found materials that continue to this day. Picasso and comics are still present, however: there is a Cubist sensibility to Drew’s installation, a work that invites the visitor to move around and consider from countless angles; and as well as a sense of a single frame of comical Acme explosion in the construct, there are also numerous details and pages of comics pasted onto shards of the wood around the space.

“From my perspective, if you're going to do installation, you need to actually have a level of respectability of what you're doing and of the space, how it will frame the actual work, how the work will, how would I say, transform the space,” Drew tells recessed.space. It’s a work that while continues his ongoing practice of interrupting existing architectures with scrapheap assemblage, is designed very site-responsively. Drew talks of the cornice, ceiling windows, proportions of the room, and specifically how the visitor enters and leaves from central doors at each end, creating a passage through the space that dictated the forms of his sculptures.




“I mean, you know, taking on the actual history of the space is one thing,” the artist says about the historic details of the main gallery, “but actually, this space already has a level of self-awareness informs the work.” Drew is not the first artist to have worked with the polite, mannered South London Gallery with architectural ambition. Amongst the many celebrated artists who have had solo shows in the gallery since it began focussing on contemporary art in 1992 – a list of the greats including Anselm Kiefer, Bill Viola, Tracey Emin, Charles Atlas, and Eva Rothschild – many have attacked the open void with space-altering ideas.

In 2001, Barbara Kruger wrapped its surfaces in huge text works before, later that year, Ross Sinclair turned it into a geometric marquee with huge fabric flags. In 2010 Michael Landy created a Perspex  bin slightly smaller than the room, a void within a void into which he invited the public to fill with unloved or forgotten artworks they had made, while more recently, in 2021, Alvaro Barrington (who we interviewed the following year, here) turned the white walls into colourfield blocks, using his sculptures and paintings to create an imaginary second floor.

Drew is aware of many of these interjections into the gallery. “I think every artist that stepped in here who was serious has actually realised that the space is also serious,” he says, adding, “I mean, I know some of the artists! Thomas Hirschorn’s piece! And Firelei Báez – you guys have had some monsters here, Christian Boltanski! And they all addressed the space, because space does act absolutely.”

Thomas Hirschorn’s 2015 intervention could be read as a precursor to Drew’s a decade later. It too was a dark, chaotic, dystopian collapse into what read like piles of detritus, rubble, and remnants. Hirschorn’s exploration of ruination took the form of mounds of post-apocalyptic flytipping, with political meaning and theory piled in alongside found, cheap materials. Drew’s could be read as political, especially with the cataclysmic nature of his home-nation, the USA, at the moment, but he won’t be drawn on such readings: “If I said that [it’s apocalyptic], then that's exactly what you’d write – whatever you are sensing, or feeling, it's right, you're right on target.”




Leonardo Drew had visited the space and planned his intervention, bringing over to London all the shards, fragments, and components he needed from his Brooklyn studio. “The interesting thing that happened though, is that we realised that the material was running out…” said the artist, who quickly came to realise that the scale of the South London Gallery’s main space was more than expected. “We had thus actual, real situation, And, well, I mean, this piece didn't exist,” he points to the piled sculpture to the right hand side of the entrance. The work facing it, on the left of the room, is constructed around a structural armature, so Drew skimped on the material intended for it, leaving it slightly hollow, and used much of the material to create a new and unplanned work addressing it.

Consequently, the two sides have different personalities. On the left is the explosion, with that void at the centre as if all material is in mid-ejection. The right, however, is more like a mountainous landslide, pieces and panels slipping over one another. While these forms are singularly in the voice of Leonardo Drew, there are other whispers within as well as the Cubist Picasso presence. There is a play with material of Theaster Gates, and within some of the small, black wood fragments there is a rhythm and order that reminds of Louise Nevelson’s timber sculptures.

Nevelson’s sculptures, however, have a rigidity and mannered feeling, whereas Drew seems to revel in a sense of collapse. And where Gates’ work celebrates the inherent histories and meanings of the carefully sourced materials he re-uses or re-presents, Drew wants to transform his found timbers to give them new stories. “I absolutely understand that there's a level of power and history, and that objects that are found have been lived in,” the artist says, “so from my perspective, that would be cheating if I were to use that material – I need to go through the process of creating and transforming the material so it echoes something that's been lived in.”




While the fragments scattered across the gallery look like they have been rescued from burnt out places, trash heaps, or are objects after their used life, it actually all begins as store-bought wood. “And then it’s attacked,” Drew excitedly says, “I apply life to it, so it goes through all the cycles of life, birth, death, and regeneration in order to give it power and once I have that figured out, I can then begin to build the structure.”

Those two, related structures will now stay in place until 07 September when the exhibition concludes. This is not the kind of work that can be carefully crated up and put in storage, it is one that is mapped for this specific space and to catalogue and rebuild all the parts in their precise location elsewhere would be an unwieldy task. So perhaps it’s good that Drew recycles and re-uses all his pieces into new works, elsewhere, and asked if that will be the case with this huge haul of blackened, shaped, carved, layered wood he has crammed into the South London Gallery? “You'll see it all again, in a different form – you better believe it!”