Leonard Koscianski

Leonard Koscianski was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1952. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 1976, and earned a B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1977. In 1919 he completed an M.F.A. at the University of California, Davis, where he was Wayne Thiebaud's teaching assistant. Since then he has pursued a teaching career in conjunction with his art making. He has been the recipient of several awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1983, 1985, and 1989, and was a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar in Italy in 1989. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. While finishing his studies at Davis, Koscianski began a pastel series that exploited the dual nature of tools as beautiful, utilitarian objects that can also harm. A strong sense of drama is evident in the high-keyed, saturated palette, the oblique angle of representation, and the exaggerated chiaroscuro of these early drawings, qualities that also appear in his more recent paintings. These techniques complement Koscianski's interest in creating threatening, quasi-Surrealist images to evoke the implied or actual power of his oversize objects.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.