White Water

A self-taught artist who always sketched and drew as a child, Leonard Contino first used paint to pin-stripe cars and hot rods in his Brooklyn neighborhood. In 1962, as the age of 19, he suffered a severe spinal cord injury in a diving accident, which left him with quadriplegia. While receiving treatment at Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University, he met another patient, artist Mark di Suvero.

Encouraged by di Suvero, Contino, using a brace for his hand, started to make drawings and eventually to paint. White Water is an excellent example of the hard-edged geometric abstractions that Contino is known for and that are included in many prestigious collections. The artist’s work, which has been described as precisionist and visionary, explored pictorial space using dynamic geometric forms.