People

People is a facsimile re-print of a 1994 book on June Leaf's sculptures, many of them kinetic, needing just a light touch, the pull of a trigger or a single breath to come to life. Leaf has described her sculptures as drawings, their wiry forms carving and unfurling into space like exploratory lines on a page. Playing and fighting figures, animals and contraptions in the tinkering spirit of Jean Tinguely emerge from intuitive combinations of brass, copper and tin; found metal rods and blades; wood and paint. Regardless of her subject, Leaf's focus is on visceral whimsy, movement, and ceaseless renewal through material and process: I think of myself as a dancer making art, she says, or an aviator making art.

Auteur
June Leaf was born in Chicago in 1929 and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the New Bauhaus / Institute of Design. Leaf's drawings, paintings and sculptures have been widely collected and are held in many museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Steidl has published her Record 1974/75. Mabou Coal Mines (2010) and Thought is Infinite (2016).