Lévy Gorvy Dayan opens Leoncillo and the Soul of Clay on 4 November 2026 at 19 East 64th Street, New York, running to 19 December. Presented in collaboration with Galleria dello Scudo, it is the first solo presentation of the Italian sculptor in New York in more than three decades.

Twelve historically significant sculptures feature, all made in the last ten years of Leoncillo's life, from the late 1950s to the 1960s. Among them are San Sebastiano nero (1962) and Tempo ferito II (1963), both last exhibited in New York in the artist's celebrated solo show at Galleria Odyssia in 1965. The exhibition centres on Leoncillo's singular relationship with clay and terracotta, materials he treated not only as his medium but as a living extension of himself.

Leoncillo Leonardi (1915-1968), born in Spoleto, was one of the most important Italian sculptors of the postwar period, representing Italy at six editions of the Venice Biennale between 1948 and 1968. He conceived clay as a substance capable of expressing tension, memory and rebirth, and his late work pushes the material to expressive extremes.

The show opens concurrently with Bacon / de Kooning, the first exhibition to place Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning side by side, focused on their smaller-scale paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s. Interest in Leoncillo is running high elsewhere too: Thaddaeus Ropac's Milan show of the artist, Perché più bruci, runs to 14 November and includes Colomba (1952–54), a work rediscovered through research by the Fondazione Leoncillo's scientific committee and restored to its original configuration.