Don Leicht

Who is Don Leicht?

Don Leicht is a visual artist who has worked as a painter and sculptor in the Bronx, New York City for over thirty years. Leicht has had one person exhibitions in New York, Sweden and Germany and is an early figure in the New York City downtown scene in the 1970s, and in the subsequent Street Art and Graffiti movements. Leicht and longtime collaborator John Fekner participated in recent street art exhibitions such as Wooster Collective's 11 Spring Street Project in 2006. Known as the original "Invader", Leicht continues to work both indoors and outdoors. Working with John Fekner, their latest outdoor project "The Stanley Cup is Missing" is currently part of the annual BLK River street art festival in Vienna, Austria.

In 1982, art writer Glenn O'Brien in a review in Artforum magazine states, "Leicht’s piece consists of a sequence of creatures that exist only on a video screen- Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and other Atari-type stable mates. Leicht has cut the forms of these leisure demons from heavy aluminum plate and enameled them with their normal, unnatural colors. But each creature has also been abraded, scratches in the enamel showing the metal underneath. One geometric thing – an abstracted dog? an “Imperial Walker”? – has been scratched with a message like a toilet-stall graffito or the “Pray” scratched on the metal of New York City phone booths.