Leandro Erlich
Palazzo Reale, Milan
22 April – 4 October 2023
Bâtiment (2004)
A building facade laid flat under a mirror suspended at a 45-degree angle
Dimensions variable
Fourteen different facades each specific to the city that
hosted the temporary installation
Nuit Blanche, Paris, France, 2004
Courtesy Galleria Continua
Changing rooms (2008)
Paneling, stools, golden frames, mirrors, curtains, carpet and lights
Dimensions variable
© Kioku Keizo, Morti Art Museum
Courtesy Galleria Continua
Palazzo Reale in Milan will host for the first time in Europe a large-scale solo exhibition of one of the most prominent figures on the international art scene: Leandro Erlich.
An Argentine artist born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Leandro Erlich creates large installations with which the public relates and interacts, becoming the artwork itself.
His unique works represent something absolutely new in the art world, bringing together creativity, vision, emotion, and fun.
Buildings on which one appears to climb, houses uprooted and suspended in mid-air, lifts going nowhere, escalators tangled like threads in a ball of yarn, disorienting and surreal sculptures, and videos that subvert normality.
These are all elements recounting something ordinary in an extraordinary context, in which everything is different from what it seems, and where we lose our sense of reality and perception of space.
Leandro Erlich’s works are the result of a profound and conceptual artistic exploration that flows into paradox and has already won over millions of visitors worldwide: 600,000 in Tokyo and 300,000 in Buenos Aires. Everywhere, the public has thronged to his exhibitions which are characterized by site-specific installations that are highly complex to make, and therefore quite rare.
At Palazzo Reale, visitors will be given the opportunity to become better acquainted with Leandro Erlich’s art through his best-known and most iconic works, brought together for the first time in a single venue with the aim of systematizing the artist’s output.
Leandro Erlich takes us to a magical elsewhere, where the possible becomes impossible, but that astonishes and excites thanks to a great aesthetic sense and a highly intrinsic poetry.
The result his explosive, fun, exciting, and unforgettable.
His work explores the perceptual bases of reality and our ability to question these same bases through a visual framework. The architecture of the everyday is a recurring theme in Leandro Erlich’s art, which aims to create a dialogue between what we believe and what we see, just as it seeks to bridge the gap between museum space and everyday experience.
The cloud (2012)
Digital ceramic ink printed on ultra-clear glass, wooden case, and LED lights
Dimensions variable and different series
© Kioku Keizo, Morti Art Museum
Courtesy Galleria Continua
LEANDRO ERLICH
Classroom (2017)
Two rooms of identical dimensions, wood, windows,
desk, chairs, door, glass, lights, blackboard, school
supplies and other classroom decorations, and black boxes
Dimensions variable
Kioku Keizo, Morti Art Museum
The artist describes himself in the following way: I like to present myself as a conceptual artist working in the realm of reality and perception. My subject is reality, symbols and the potential for meaning. I strive to create a body of work – especially in the public sphere – that is open to the imagination, subverts normality, rethinks representation, and proposes actions that construct and deconstruct situations to disrupt reality. Speaking generally.
Each of Leandro Erlich’s works is to be read as a window onto the world that is sensitive to the gaze, that instead of misleading reveals the landscape that every person holds within his or her self.
At first reaction, an Leandro Erlich work elicits a sense of familiarity with respect to the everyday, before raising a certain, insinuating doubt. By carefully gazing at the work, viewers begin to doubt what they perceive, as they are confronted with an inexplicable phenomenon.
Stirring up questions, doubts, and emotions in the public interacting with his works is leandro Erlich’s primary thought, and it is the viewer’s participation that makes the work complete. It is difficult to explain Erlich with words. He has to be experienced to be understood.
Promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Culture, the exhibition is produced and organized by Palazzo Reale and Arthemisia in collaboration with Studio Erlich, and is curated by Francesco Stocchi.
LEANDRO ERLICH - BIOGRAPHY
A world-renowned contemporary Argentine artist, Leandro Erlich creates works that use optical illusions and sound effects to shake our notions of common sense. Although what the public sees, from the large-scale installation to videos, might appear familiar at first sight, closer examination reveals a surprising and unsettling deviation from the usual, in the form, for example of a boat floating in the absence of water, or of people attached to the wall in various poses.
Born in Argentina in 1973. Lives and works in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo.
In recent times, his exhibitions have broken all admissions records, regardless of geography or type of institution: from MORI Art Museum (Tokyo, 2017) which attracted more than 600,000 visitors, to HOW Art Museum (Shanghai, 2018) and Liminal, the major anthological exhibition at MALBA (Buenos Aires) seen by more than 300,000 people; at The Confines of The Great Void at CAFAM (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing), China’s leading museum, Erlich became the first non-Chinese artist to occupy the entire exhibition space until the retrospective currently touring Brazil (CCBB Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo). In December 2022, a new version of Liminal, his first anthological exhibition in the United States, opened at PAMM in Miami, where it will be on display until September 2023.
Erlich began his professional career at 18 years of age with a solo exhibition at Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires and, after receiving several grants (El Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Fundación Antorchas), continued his studies in the Core Program, an artist residency in Houston (Glassell School of Art, 1998), where he developed his famed works Swimming Pool and Living Room. In 2000 he participated in the Whitney Biennale with Rain, and in 2001 he represented Argentina at the 49th Venice Biennale, with Swimming Pool, an emblematic piece that is part of the permanent collection of the 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa (Japan) and the Voorlinden Museum (Netherlands).
Erlich has been honoured with numerous international critics’ awards, including the Roy Neuberger Exhibition Award (NY, 2017), Nomination for the Prix Marcel Duchamp (Paris, 2006), the UNESCO Prize (Istanbul, 2001), the Leonardo Prize (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, 2000), and Fondo Nacional de las Artes (Buenos Aires, 1992).
His works can be found in many private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tate Modern, London; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; 21st Century Museum of Art Kanazawa, Japan; MACRO, Roma; The Jerusalem Museum; FNAC, France; Ville de Paris et SCNF, France; Voorlinden Museum, Netherlands; MUSAC, Spain.
PALAZZO REALE, MILANO
