Franco Leidi - Return

Franco Leidi: Return is published on the occasion of the retrospective and first exhibition of the artist Franco Leidi in Italy. Leidi was born in 1933 in Milan and grew up in Genova. In the 1970s he emigrated to Sweden, where he became an established artist. He never exhibited his work in his country of birth during his lifetime. The work of Franco Leidi, a self-declared communist who was profoundly influenced by his childhood experiences of World War II in fascist Italy, evolves from drawing, print and watercolour into sculpture and in- stallation. While his late works – portraits in watercolour, often combined with collage – offer a complex iconographic reference system, his early producti- on is characterized by multilayered representations of power and oppression: men, women, furniture and tools are trapped in a hermetic system, in which they struggle against and exert violence upon one another. Franco Leidi: Return takes the artist’s posthumous homecoming as an oppor- tunity to examine his work through the lens of the present day and show its relevance to the current political and cultural context. Besides numerous black/ white and colour images, the publication includes texts by Viana Conti, Leslie Johnson, Verena Buttmann and Jorgen Svensson.