Jeffery Leder Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by New York artist Vincent Inconiglios. Opening January 16, 2011 and running through February 13, 2011, Gansevoort Girls: Select Collage Works is a selection of over 30 pieces that reinforces Jeffrey Leder’s commitment to represent important work by contemporary artists in his Long Island City creative space.

“Gansevoort Girls are innocent and experienced, funny, scary, depressed, repressed, colorful and sexy, bruised, tarnished and beautiful… Gansevoort Girls are a puzzle,” says Inconiglios. “The street is a theater of inspiration and change – where perception and reality often blur.” He has experienced firsthand Gansevoort Street’s transition through the grittiness of the ’70s and ’80s, to a new decadence of the 2000s in New York City’s historic Meatpacking District.

Inconiglios has been living and working in his studio on Gansevoort Street since 1969. He began his first series of Gansevoort Girls in the 1970s as a reaction to the street life. Back then, his studio was filled with large paintings and his “friends from the street” – a multitude of faces, masks, figures and found objects stapled and taped to the walls. Inconiglios has revisited this theme in his latest collage works that parody the transformation the Gansevoort Girls represent.

“Vincent Inconiglios’ collages are a compelling take on the hipster denizens of his Meatpacking neighborhood,” says gallery director Jeffrey Leder. “They evolved from a deconstruction of objects and space, light and shadow, line and color. The brilliant end result is a distortion that plays on our perceptions.”

Large portrait collages in the exhibition are suspended from the gallery ceiling, showing front and back. The animated, psychologically charged compositions come calling for our attention… inviting a conversation of diverse emotions and interpretations. The viewer can interact with them as people they might meet (or avoid) on the street.

Selections from Inconiglios’ street life-inspired Wallpaper Series will also be exhibited. They provide further insight into Inconiglios’ use of collage to create visual metaphor.

“Even the streets of the Meatpacking District are laid out like a collage – they break with the New York grid,” says Inconiglios, reflecting on the neighborhood that has inspired him for over 40 years. “Here there is a unique sense of place, smell, history and diversity.”

Vincent Inconiglios has exhibited in the U.S. and abroad and his work is in both public and private collections. He had his first one-man exhibition in NYC in SoHo in 1972 and was among the featured artists of the groundbreaking “10 Downtown” in the 1970s, opening his studio on Gansevoort Street to the public.