You go through all the fighting not because you want to fight, but because you want to get somewhere as a people. You want to help create a world where you can sit around and think about clouds.

Raffaella Cortese is pleased to inaugurate the new season with a solo show by the American artist Zoe Leonard. Well known from the 80’s for her activism and her firm commitment to fighting against cultural, political or sexual discrimination, Leonard is interested in the originai role of photography as a record of reality.

Zoe Leonard presents her recent works, a series of colour photographs of streets, shop- windows and signs taken in the metropolitan area of New York. These unusual views and subjects, now even further from common iconography, seem to be taken in zones of privation and marginalization, where often a kind of poetic revenge exists. Other images show trees, growing in the city between fences and gates, bearing strange fruits, plastic carrier bags caught amidst their branches.

The artist also presents four “Suitcase Sculptures”, installations made from old suitcases stacked up or scattered through the gallery’s rooms. About these works, Leonard writes “… they seem to be portraits in a certain way, of certain people, memories of specific places, moments. They are evocative of family, childhood departures and leave-taking. The moments in your life when your bags are packed. We all remember moments … the day he left, the night we picked her up at the airport, the day you left home. Packing for vacation, or moving to a strange city. These condensed moments of anticipation, pleasure, anxiety, grieving, loss”.