On her 20th anniversary, Raffaella Cortese is pleased to present a two-person show by US artists Zoe Leonard (works and lives in NY, b. 1961) and James Welling (works and lives in L.A., b.1951). The project has involved both artists, who gave shape to the main concept and selected the works on the basis of a reciprocal esteem and knowledge of each other.
The joint exhibition of Leonard and Welling embodies the gallery interest in a conceptual approach to photography and reflects the parallel-exhibition program held in its venues (such as the shows by Martha Rosler and Ana Mendieta, Jessica Stockholder and Karla Black, to name but a few).
The artists have fluently explored a mercurial set of issues and ideas through photography: realism, abstraction, representation, personal and cultural memory, analyzing the chemical nature of photography.
Their works focus on an exploration of the medium, by deeply investigating materials, production and history of photography. At the same time the two artists share the same interest in cultural and personal ideas of memory and time. In particular they have worked on projects centered on light, not only as the main source of photography, but also researching an aesthetical impact.
Feature project presents a selection of Welling’s earliest works – the rare Diary/Landscape (1977) and LA architecture & portrait photos (1976) – that portended his most known Light Sources (1980) that is considered by Zoe a datum point for her most recent series Sun Photographs (2011), which will be partially on show.
The exhibition set up plays on the different format and aesthetic characteristics of the series shown. James Welling’s small-size framed Diary/Landscape and L.A. architecture & portrait – clear, fully detailed and centered on timelessness – will alternate with the wider and unframed abstract light portraits by Zoe Leonard, the title of which is the day of the shot.
In 2014 Available Light, a book about the Sun Photographs series by Leonard, was published and presented at the Whitney Biennial. The book Diary/landscape that gathers the entire series of almost 150 images by Welling was published to accompany the first-ever complete exhibition of this series of pivotal photographs, now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.