For Frieze Masters London 2022, Ortuzar Projects is pleased to announce a three-person presentation of works by Cynthia Hawkins, Suzanne Jackson, and June Leaf. Working from the physical world around them, each artist has developed a singular artistic language of transformation that probes the lines between figuration and abstraction, the natural and the human, and painting and its other. Sharing a process-oriented approach, the artists’ oeuvres reveal an open-endedness and tendency towards evolution, resulting in radical shifts within each of their decades-long practice despite their works’ persistent themes.

Hawkins' work from the 1980s and early 1990s charts the development of symbolic language through sequences of shapes and signs that are, as she has written, “strung together [to] imply a sentence or a passage of text.” The intertextual relationships between these marks merge into an ecosystem of forms that develop the painterly beyond mere expressionism. In Jackson’s work of the 1970s, figures and recurring symbols are built up through multiple layers of acrylic wash on canvas, creating ethereal paintings in which firm distinctions between depicted elements are dissolved. Since moving to Savannah in the late 1990s, Jackson has developed a novel language of “environmental abstraction,” in which cast-away materials and objects from her garden and home are incorporated into sculptural works that extend off, and eventually break away from, the wall. Creating scenographies that resemble plays within plays, Leaf has developed a cosmology of characters that exists fluidly across painting, drawing, assemblage and kinetic sculpture. Since establishing studios between New York City and the remote town of Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 1969, Leaf has incorporated representations of the artist in her studio, figures part animal or machine, and actors who make direct addresses to their viewers in an exploration of agency, the artistic process, and the human condition.

Cynthia Hawkins (b.1950, New York) received a doctorate degree in American Studies from the University of Buffalo, SUNY with a dissertation titled, “African American Agency and the Art Object, 1868–1917,” and until recently she was the gallery director and curator at the Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery, SUNY Geneseo, New York. Hawkins’ solo exhibitions include Natural Things, 1996–99, STARS, Los Angeles (2022), Clusters: Stellar and Earthly, Buffalo Science Museum, Buffalo (2009), New Works: The Currency of Meaning, Cinque Gallery, New York (1989), and Cynthia Hawkins, Just Above Midtown/Downtown Gallery, New York (1981). She is included in the survey Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022). Her work is in the public collections of The La Grange Art Museum, La Grange, Georgia; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, among others. She lives and works in Rochester, New York.

Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944, St. Louis) lives and works in Savannah, Georgia. From 1969–70 she ran Gallery 32 from her live/work studio at 672 South Lafayette Park Place in Los Angeles. Recent solo and survey exhibitions include Listen' N Home, The Arts Club of Chicago (2022); You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby, Ortuzar Projects, New York (2021); Off the Wall, Mnuchin Gallery, New York (2021); Suzanne Jackson: News!, Ortuzar Projects, New York (2019); Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades, Jepson Center/Telfair Museums, Savannah (2019); holding on to a sound, O-Town House, Los Angeles (2019); Life Model: Charles White and His Students, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Brooklyn Museum, New York and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2018–20); Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, New York, and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2011–13); and Gallery 32 & Its Circle, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles (2009). Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and the California African American Museum, among others.

June Leaf (b. 1929, Chicago) has had solo exhibitions that include June Leaf: Thought is Infinite, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); June Leaf, Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2004); A Survey of Painting, Sculpture and Works on Paper, 1948–1991, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover (1991); and June Leaf Retrospective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1978). Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among others. Leaf has been the recipient of prestigious awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1989), a Fulbright Grant (1958), as well as an honorary degree from DePaul University, Chicago and an Honorary Degree from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.