Elizabeth Leach Gallery

Congrats Derek Franklin on new review in The Brooklyn Rail 🗞️ For his latest solo exhibition at ELG ‘The Poet’s Lips’ you can view the exhibition on our website

Article Link in Bio 🪈

Derek Franklin
‘TOS #53, 2026
Oil on canvas
62 x 50 inches

Derek Franklin 🍰

“The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it’s the sand of the Colosseum.”
— Gracchus (Derek Jacobi), Gladiator (Scott, 2000)

Matthew Picton’s ‘Circus Maximus #2’ is a quadriptych, four panels spanning 104 inches, and the structure is not incidental. Repetition runs through everything here, though whether repetition points to something in the architecture of human appetite or simply in Picton’s layering of imagery is a question the work leaves deliberately open.

Picton builds from an enlarged architectural reconstruction of the Circus Maximus by French architect Paul Letarouilly, the ancient Roman arena holding up to 250,000 spectators and serving as the city’s primary site of mass entertainment for centuries. Through that framework he cuts an audience: figures from Federico Fellini’s Roma caught in a moment of collective upward gaze, faces tilted toward a cinema screen showing early gladiator films, the crowd folded into the very stage set designed to hold them.

Fellini made Roma in 1972 as an impressionistic self-portrait of a city absorbing and outlasting everything, a place where ancient spectacle and modern chaos existed in the same breath. Ridley Scott returned to the same terrain in Gladiator nearly thirty years later, reconstructing the arena as a site of brutality and catharsis. In Picton’s hand-cut arena floor, stills from Scott’s film are placed directly into the Circus Maximus itself, gladiators returned to the sand, the Hollywood reconstruction collapsed back into the Roman original.

Behind everything sits Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 18th century engraving of the Colosseum, reversed, his meticulous document of ruin turned back on itself. Piranesi spent decades drawing Rome’s remains with an almost obsessive fidelity. Flipped, his Colosseum becomes something stranger. The crowd is still there. The sand is still there. Whether the circle closes or simply continues is something Picton leaves for the viewer to sit with.

Matthew Picton | A Deeper Picture
Now on view until June 27

Matthew Picton
‘Circus Maximus #2’, 2024
Hand-cut archival pigment print assemblage
38 × 104 inches
Quadriptych

Matthew Picton 🎞️

W***y Heeks | ‘Intervals’
On view until June 27

Heeks spent much of the 1970s and 80s living and painting in New York City before returning to Rhode Island in 1996, carrying the weight of American abstract painting traditions with him. For Heeks, color functions not as ornament but as argument. Through his eye, form remains restlessly contemporary. Vibrant brushstrokes build over atmospheric passages, bright shapes and playful lines hovering over ethereal space, the shapes, sounds, and messaging of the present world pulled onto the canvas and filtered through a practice rooted in abstraction’s longest conversations. ‘Intervals’ pushes further, oil and acrylic spray colliding on the surface, adding urgency to a practice already full of it.

W***y Heeks
‘Beacon’, 2026
mixed media on canvas mounted panel
23.75 x 23.75 inches

W***y Heeks 🐚

‘Let’s Play’ opens at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in conjunction with Portland Arts Week: Art x Sports.

Reflecting on the gallery’s 45 years of exhibiting regional, national, and international art, Let’s Play brings together works that capture the pathos, angst, and exhilaration embedded in athletic competition and spectatorship. The exhibition spans a broad range of approaches: from the humor and absurdity latent in sports culture to its darker psychological terrain, from the dynamism of athletic movement to the way sports objects carry collective memory and identity. Several artists work directly with found materials, repurposing jerseys and clothing left behind by fans to interrogate how athletics shape who we are and how we see ourselves.

Portland Arts Week launches its inaugural summit this July, activating Portland’s Cultural Corridor with exhibitions, dialogues, performances, and community events. Bringing together local luminaries, arts organizations, galleries, and national thought leaders, the week examines how athletics and culture shape identity, community, and innovation. Programming includes a symposium at the Portland Art Museum, a citywide gallery walk, an event at PICA, and additional downtown performances throughout the week.

Portland Arts Week 🏀

Elizabeth Leach Gallery | Let’s Play
July 2 - August 21, 2026
Opening Reception July 9, 5:30 - 7:30 PM

M.K. Guth
‘Kelly and Dave’, 2006
Lenticular photograph
26 × 43 inches framed
Edition 5/5

Matthew Picton | A Deeper Picture 
On view until June 27

‘Cathedral’ is among the most ambitious work in A Deeper Picture, and its most layered. At 9 and half feet tall across three panels, the work itself, a triptych, a form mirroring its subject: the Three Magi whose relics were brought to Cologne in 1164 and for whom the cathedral was built, construction beginning in 1248 and continuing across six centuries. 

A site of pilgrimage, designed using the proportions of the Vesica Piscis, that ancient geometric form understood to embody divine harmony. Picton treats it not as monument but as threshold: a space where the earthly and celestial compress into one another.

“The Edifice built by Tarkovsky in each of his films is structurally, semantically and functionally a cathedral.” — Elena Dulgheru

Into the churche’s structure Picton weaves film stills from Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Nostalgia, Flemish landscapes by Bruegel the Elder, and Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished Adoration of the Magi, all hand-cut and layered in printed paper.

In Stalker, a Writer and a Professor follow a guide into the Zone, a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the laws of physics dissolve and ego must be surrendered before the journey can continue. The destination is a room where a person’s deepest desires are made real. Tarkovsky frames it as spiritual pilgrimage, a descent into the innermost landscape of the human soul. Picton’s Cathedral holds that same architecture: ruined spaces as portals, timescales collapsing, reason giving way.

Matthew Picton
‘Cathedral’, 2025
Hand-cut archival pigment print assemblage
114 x 69 inches

W***y Heeks | ‘Intervals’
On view until June 27

Based in Rhode Island, Heeks has been creating dynamic abstract paintings for over 40 years. He is interested in the complex spatial relationships in pattern, line and fields of color.

The new body of work in ‘Intervals’ continues this investigation through a material process of oil, acrylic spray paint colliding on the canvas.

W***y Heeks
‘Poet’, 2023
Oil and acrylic on canvas
46 x 43 inches

〰️➰

“𝕿𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖊 𝖆𝖗𝖊 𝖓𝖔 𝖌𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖙 𝖒𝖆𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖘 𝖑𝖊𝖋𝖙. 𝕿𝖍𝖆𝖙’𝖘 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖑 𝖊𝖛𝖎𝖑 𝖔𝖋 𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖙𝖎𝖒𝖊. 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝖍𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖙’𝖘 𝖕𝖆𝖙𝖍 𝖎𝖘 𝖈𝖔𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖊𝖉 𝖎𝖓 𝖘𝖍𝖆𝖉𝖔𝖜.”

— Domenico, Nostalgia (Tarkovsky, 1983)

‘No Great Masters’ was the first work Picton made in the series that would become his latest exhibition ‘A Deeper Picture’, and it’s thematically the darkest. Drawing on Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, Picton builds the image in hand-cut layers of printed paper: Roman Forum architecture, flames, candlelight, and film stills, collapsing time and reference into a single dense surface.

The scene at its center is Domenico’s self-immolation atop the statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill, the ancient seat of Roman power and a site of sacrifice long before Tarkovsky placed his character there. Aurelius, the stoic philosopher-emperor whose Meditations remain in print two thousand years on, whose reign marked the end of Rome’s golden era. His son Commodus succeeded him, ignored the senate, ignored all counsel, and became what historians regard as Rome’s worst emperor. He was assassinated. The empire entered civil war.

Tarkovsky’s film carries this weight without resolution. Domenico’s act of purification by fire is taken up by the protagonist Andrei, who in his final act carries a lit candle across a drained pool, the flame passed between them, the sacrifice incomplete and then completed. A world gone astray. A humanity that has lost its bearings through materialism and the erosion of faith. Picton does not draw the line to the present out loud. The title does that quietly on its own.

Matthew Picton | ‘A Deeper Picture’
Now on view until June 27

Matthew Picton
‘No Great Masters’, 2025.
Hand-cut archival pigment print assemblage.
35 × 55.5 inches

🏛️

Film stills from Nostalgia, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983.

Marco Dente, Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, 1515-27. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, 1959.

Join us in celebrating the opening of two new solo exhibitions this week for First Thursday!

Matthew Picton | A Deeper Picture
W***y Heeks | Intervals
Opening June 4, 5:30 - 7:30 PM

A Deeper Picture, Matthew Picton’s sixth exhibition with the gallery, builds on the artist’s creative trajectory. Drawing inspiration from David Hockney’s 2012 exhibition A Bigger Picture and anchored by the metaphysical films of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, Picton’s hand-cut sculptural assemblages for this exhibition weave together film stills with art-historical references and blueprints by French architect Paul Letarouilly. Through the use of color, pattern, and tactile dimension, Picton generates expansive scenes that offer seemingly infinite narrative paths.

W***y Heek’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, Intervals, features new variations of colorful and expressive paintings and works on paper. Throughout his practice, Heeks explores the constant flow of modern-day messaging and information through layered imagery and dynamic compositions. In these new works, he shifts his palette toward bright blues, yellows, pinks, and greens, incorporating amorphous lines that loosely trace and outline compositional forms. In some paintings, Heeks has built textured surfaces through layered brushstrokes, emphasizing movement and the physicality of his process. Working through an improvisational approach that blends intention with subconscious impulse, Heeks creates atmospheric paintings and works on paper that draw viewers into their shifting visual language.

Matthew Picton
‘Nostalgia’, 2025
Hand cut archival pigment print assemblage
56.25 x 42 inches

W***y Heeks
‘Beacon’, 2026
mixed media on canvas mounted panel
23.75 x 23.75 inches