Lennon, Weinberg is pleased to present the first exhibition of Roy Dowell in New York in a decade. The show will include twenty-one new collages, all but three an identically scaled 16×11-1/2 inches.   For more than thirty years, Dowell has combined a precise painting technique with elements from printed materials. In his new collages, he has chosen to depart from his traditional reliance on ready-made materials, such as scraps from billboard ads or commercial signage, in favor of painting or drawing most of the assembled components. Where Dowell’s collages previously related to one another through the use of shared printed elements, each of these new collages has a decidedly more individualistic approach toward exposing and reframing the fabric of his visual language.   The practice of collage is deeply rooted in the history of modernism, but also represents a very contemporary response to the cacophony of image and information that surround us. Artists “collage” entire room-sized installations or videos as a way of embedding multiple meanings and references into their work. In regard to his relationship to European modernism and mid-century abstraction, Dowell offers: “Certainly there are those things, but it also comes from an interest in ethnographic art, from my interests in Mexico, Latin America, Africa… I’m not interested in the symbology, but the aesthetics of it. I’m not using them for their meaning. I am aware that it is there, but it comes along for the ride.”   Roy Dowell has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. His work is included in many museum collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Four collages from Dowell’s current series were recently acquired by the Hammer Museum. He shows regularly with Margo Leavin Gallery and was previously represented in New York by Curt Marcus Gallery and Fawbush Gallery. He is the founder and chair of the Graduate Fine Arts Department at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.