Exhibition · Abbozzo Gallery · Toronto
Pull Up a Chair Abbozzo Gallery is pleased to present Pull Up a Chair, a solo exhibition by Toronto-based artist, Leslie Norgate. Bringing together oil paintings, works on paper, mixed media, and sculpture, the exhibition considers how ordinary structures, such as interiors, city streets, winter yards, and rivers poise themselves to hold traces of human presence. The chair, a familiar object shaped around the absent body, offers the exhibition its central invitation. To occupy a chair is to parallel its anatomical language: back, arms, legs, feet, seat. In Norgate’s work, the chair becomes a structure where presence can be felt indirectly. It suggests the sitter through absence, as conversation flees through the room, leaving an object and its accumulated marks. This attention to what remains after use runs throughout the exhibition. In Conversation and Breakfast, domestic space becomes charged through arrangement and light. The viewer senses the room as a place of daily ritual, shaped by habits that have become almost invisible. In Livingroom, rendered in charcoal and chalk, the interior is reduced to a more spectral register. The softness of the medium allows the scene to hover between observation and memory, as if the room were being recalled rather than recorded. Norgate’s paintings of the city extend this same sensitivity outward. Night Alley, Backyards in Winter, Gardiner Under Repair, Street with Pylons, and Don River focus on sites that are often passed through, rarely dwelled upon. These works approach Toronto through its overlooked intervals: infrastructure, side streets, yards, repair zones, and waterways. The city appears through accumulation rather than monumentality. It is built from surfaces that weather, structures that age, and spaces that continue to hold human movement even when no figure is present. Norgate’s process deepens this sense of slow attention. Her paintings often begin with photographs of scenes that arrest her in the course of daily…