Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard is one of the most influential artists of her generation. Combining a precise conceptualism with her highly personal approach, her work blends photography, sculpture, and installation. Al río / To the River , which she began in 2016, is an ambitious photographic project that explores the more than 1,500-kilometer boarder river between the United States and Mexico. Leonard approaches the river, known as the Río Bravo in Mexico and the Rio Grande in the United States, with a multifaceted leitmotif in which cultural, environmental, historical, social, political, and economic concerns intersect.

Al río / To the River was created through close observation of both the river's natural environment, which it has itself shaped, and the surrounding man-made environment-from deserts and mountains to large and small cities and villages, where daily life takes place in time with farming, commerce, industry, or police surveillance. Leonard's photographs target major infrastructure projects and other structures such as dams, bridges, pipelines, fences, and checkpoints built alongside or in the river that control not only the course of the water but also the flow of goods and people back and forth across it.

"The natural course of a river, subject to constant change, regularly altering its course and shifting its bed due to high water," Leonard says, "forms a great contrast to the tasks of a political nature required of it."

This comprehensive and visually stunning publication consists of two volumes in a slipcase. The first volume contains Leonard's photographs, while the second gathers essays by an impressive range of international artists, essayists, journalists, poets, and scholars-among them, Natalie Diaz and Álvaro Enrigue. Conceived as an alternative way of disseminating their work, the publication also provides an interdisciplinary reference for anyone interested in the river, environmental issues, borderland culture, and contemporary border issues

Berlin, March 1, 2022 - For more than thirty years, Zoe Leonard (b. 1961, Liberty, New York) has received much acclaim for her work. Originally rooted in photography, her work has expanded to include installations and sculpture. Her art results primarily from a keen power of observation, in which the documentary nature of photography is combined with the sensual act of looking. The themes of her work are migration and displacement, gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, cultural history, and the tension between nature and manmade habitats.

ZOE LEONARD (b. 1961, Liberty, New York) works in the media of photography, sculpture, and installation. Her participation in documenta 9 brought her work to international attention. Leonard's work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including MOCA-Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); and MoMA, New York (2015). She lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas.