Zoe Leonard, a celebrated artist whose work is headed to the Venice Biennale next week, has departed one of the world’s biggest art galleries and joined the roster of a much smaller one based only in New York.
Until earlier this year, Leonard was represented by Hauser & Wirth, a gallery with 14 locations worldwide. She has now departed that gallery and joined Maxwell Graham, a much less blue-chip space that is known for its spare presentations of conceptual art. Maxwell Graham will represent Leonard alongside her longtime galleries, Cologne’s Galeria Gisela Capitain and Milan’s Raffaella Cortese.
Maxwell Graham’s roster is dominated mainly by artists at least a generation younger than Leonard, among them Cameron Rowland, Ser Serpas, Hamishi Farah, and Tiffany Sia.
“Zoe Leonard’s work has observed the world,” Maxwell Graham wrote in its announcement on Friday. “For over 40 years Leonard has been among the most critically acclaimed artists of her generation.”
Leonard’s work is often marked by an interest in loss and decay, in ways both literal and not. One of her most famous works, Strange Fruit (1992–97), is an installation composed of 300 fruit skins that she sewed back together, as though the lemons, grapefruits, and bananas featured were whole once more. She is also well-known for I want a president, a 1992 piece consisting of text describing dissatisfaction with America’s leadership during the time of the AIDS crisis.
Photography has been her primary medium, and in recent years, she has turned her lens on the US-Mexico border for a series called “Al río / To the River” (2016–22). She’s also worked in more conceptual modes, turning a room of the Whitney Museum’s former Marcel Breuer–designed home into a camera obscura for a work in the 2014 Whitney Biennial that won her the show’s top prize.
Leonard is participating in Koyo Kouoh’s Venice Biennale exhibition “In Minor Keys” as part of fierce pussy, a New York–based collective of queer women artists.
“Our collaboration with Zoe began over a decade ago, and during these years it has been a great pleasure to work with an artist of her sensitivity and conviction,” Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth told ARTnews. “We’ve been honored to support very substantially such epic works as her ongoing ‘Al Rio/To the River’ project and look forward to watching her practice continue evolving in its next phase as she joins Maxwell Graham.”
Maxwell Graham’s release did not provide a reasoning for why she had left Hauser & Wirth, which began staging exhibitions for her in 2016. Maxwell Graham staged its first Leonard exhibition last year with “Display,” featuring photographs of historical objects in museums that were shot in the 1990s but not printed until recently.
She is the second artist to leave Hauser & Wirth in the past year. In November, George Condo exited the gallery and joined Skarstedt and Sprüth Magers.
