Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Leave Room for the Wind, an exhibition of new work by artist Dominic Chambers. Born in St. Louis, MO (1993) and currently based in New Haven, CT, Chambers creates vibrant paintings that frequently portray scenes of leisure, joy, and quiet contemplation. In his newest body of work, Chambers continues his examination of the contemporary role of leisure—focusing on its relationship to nature—and explores how art can function as a mode for understanding, recontextualizing, or renegotiating one’s relationship to the world. Leave Room for the Wind coincides with the artist’s debut solo museum exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (on view through February 15, 2024) and marks the artist's first major solo exhibition in New York.

Chambers is often inspired by literature ­and has cited Magical Realism, alongside writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, as significantly influential to his practice. For Leave Room for the Wind, Chambers turned to poetry, engaging with the writing of Tracy K. Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Mary Oliver. The artist took particular inspiration from Oliver’s book-length poem The leaf and the Cloud, in which the author states “I will leave room for the wind combing the grass, / for the feather falling out of the grouse’s fan-tail, / and fluttering down, like a song.” Drawing simultaneously from the art historical cannon and combining fundamental tenets from formal models like color field painting and gestural abstraction, in this body of work Chambers explores the recreational activity of kite flying, considering what it might mean to “leave room for the wind” as Oliver suggests.