Leckie Gassman’s blown glass vessels exude a deceptively playful naivete while quoting from historical shapes and leveraging advanced blowing and finishing skills. Strong colors, blended in multi-layer ombres provide a canvas for the artist’s graceful graffiti-style imagery that he hand-etches in riotous scrawls and arabesques. It is the tension between precious and refined material of hand-blown glass and the seemingly spontaneous, roughly etched imagery that makes his work gut-wrenchingly compelling.

Leckie’s works rewinds graffiti to the origins of the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"); freely engraving his cartoonish characters and text that would be equally at home on the walls of a highway underpass. His work bites into the zeitgeist of the high/low populism that defines our moment.