Do you believe what you see? After captivating millions of visitors in Tokyo, Miami, and Milan, an exhibition dedicated to Leandro Erlich arrives for the first time in France at the Grand Palais. From one work to another, perspectives shift, architectures are disrupted, and reality transforms before your eyes.
Known for his spectacular installations in public spaces, Leandro Erlich explores the mechanisms of perception. At the intersection of installation, sculpture, and architecture, his immersive works - conceived at a human scale - take the form of dispositifs activated by the viewer’s presence. By moving through and observing, each visitor becomes part of the experience.
The artist draws on techniques borrowed from illusionism and trompe-l’œil: mirrors, appearances, shifts in scale, and perspective effects. Using elements from everyday life, he creates situations that unsettle reference points and transform our relationship to space.
Conceived in collaboration with curator Fabrice Bousteau, the exhibition unfolds as a progressive journey composed of fourteen monumental and iconic installations: levitating boats, weightless clouds, modernist architectures transformed into infinite labyrinths, as well as a Haussmann-style building tipped onto its side that visitors can climb.
Several installations, specially conceived for this retrospective, play with the inversion of perspective. What is perceived from the outside is transformed once inside. Viewpoints shift, and points of reference become unstable. Punctuated with artistic, literary, and architectural references, the exhibition also traces the artist’s trajectory and questions the way we perceive reality.
In the mirror, I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that virtually opens up behind the surface; I am over there, where I am not, a kind of shadow that gives me my own visibility, that allows me to look at myself where I am absent - a utopia of the mirror. - Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, lecture, 1967 (published in Dits et Écrits, 1978)
Exhibition organised and produced by the GrandPalaisRmn and Arthemisia
Curator
Fabrice Bousteau
Other information
About Leandro Erlich
Leandro Erlich was born in Argentina in 1973 and lives and works in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. Over the past two decades, his work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the permanent collections of prestigious museums and private collections, including the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Tate Modern, London; the Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; the MACRO, Rome; and the Israel Museum, among other renowned cultural institutions.
As a conceptual artist, his work questions the foundations of our perception of reality and explores art’s capacity to raise questions from a visual perspective. His creations aim to bridge the gap between the museum or gallery space and everyday experiences, inviting the viewer to actively participate in the construction of meaning.
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Bâtiment, 2004. Digital print on linoleum, lights, iron, wood, and mirror Le Centquatre, Paris, 2011
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You'll never see the world the same way again! Book your tickets to discover, under the glass roof of the Grand Palais or in its exhibition galleries, the large-scale projects by international contemporary artists Leandro Erlich and Laure Prouvost: two...
