The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent photographs and sculpture by Zoe Leonard.

In the past, Leonard’s work has taken as its subject the denaturalized terrain of landscape, language and the body. Using black and white photography to present the complex mapping of cultural codes on the “natural” world, Leonard creates work which places the subject, the viewer and the medium of photography under scrutiny.

In her present show, Zoe Leonard will exhibit photographs, a deconstructed/ reconstructed tree and an installation of decomposing, sewn fruit. Like her earlier photographs of anatomical models or prosthetic devices, the present work relates symbolically to the acculturation of nature and to the ironic role of the substitute in attempting to preserve what is lost or missing. From her sewn, decaying fruit skins held together by zippers, buttons and thread to her parceled, bandaged tree with its tape, clothespins and wax coated leaves, Leonard’s work is about mourning and remembering— a gesture to preserve what will soon decay. Her work also speaks of a certain private, introspective space. Its power is in its silence, in its inherent subjectivity.

Zoe Leonard was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Recent one-person shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida; the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland; the Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland; the Vienna Secession in Austria; and the Galerija Dante in Umag, Croatia.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com