Zachary Leener

Parker Gallery is proud to present its second solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Zachary Leener. Titled Cloud Chips, this exhibition features nine new ceramic sculptures displayed on tiered pedestals.

Often working within typological groups, Leener builds iterations of notional forms—shapes that originate in the mind before being realized in three dimensions with terra cotta clay.

For this new body of work, Leener draws on personal and autobiographical situations, using specific memories to speak to broader human themes. Contemplating a pair of aging elders in Double Figur (all works 2025), two mounds of mustard glaze emerge from a solid foundation, shrouded by a hood. They droop, weighed down by a constellation of globular memories. A raw porcelain rocking chair-cum-cradle (in Sleep Shape with gash) recalls the visceral feeling of watching a loved one battle illness. These sculptures act as reliquaries of humble, human existence.

Extending the potential for private metaphor, Leener frequently incorporates found materials of personal significance—fragments of heirlooms, wildfire ash, stray strands of hair, construction debris—into the clay and glaze at varying intervals, imbuing the sculptures with material history and psychic charge.

Other works include an additive assortment of found objects relating to a ceramics studio practice. Poking out the front of Portrait are a pair of unsuspecting kiln stilts, repurposed as gaping eyeballs, or possibly pointy nipples. A large, unceremoniously formed ball of clay, salvaged from the discard bin of the studio where Leener teaches, is incorporated, unaltered, into Milk Stone—it perches atop a cornflower blue plinth, enveloped by an earthy surround. These found elements, inserted in small acts of meditative improvisation, are inextricably part of a rigorously constructed whole.

For Leener, clay's fundamental plasticity provides an arena for his idiosyncratic and deeply personal mode of symbolic abstraction. Any object, even a fully finished sculpture already glazed and fired several times, can be absorbed into something else, fused together in place and time by the unpredictable crucible of the kiln.

Zachary Leener (b. 1981 in Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Clock, go inside a stone, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY (2023), Figur, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2021), Shekhinah, Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York, NY (2020), Family Practice, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada (2019), and Zachary Leener: Three Sculptures, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA (2019). Select group exhibitions include Portals with Ken Tisa: Organized by Mindy Shapero, Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, CA (2025), Undertones: Biomorphic Art in Los Angeles, University Art Gallery, Cal Poly SLO, CA (2019), Soft Corners, Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA (2018), Softcore, South Willard, Los Angeles, CA (2018), Of a well-sucked apricot pit, Tif Sigfrids, Los Angeles, CA (2017), and Build Your Own House, Dio Horia, Mykonos, Greece (2017). He received his MFA from University of California, Riverside and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.