Leandro Erlich: Liminal

Over the past two decades, his work has been shown internationally and featured in the permanent collections of major museums and private collectors. He enjoys particular renown in Asia, and his most recent exhibitions at the MORI Art Museum (Tokyo, 2017) and the HOW Art Museum (Shanghai, 2018) have attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. On June his new show Próximamente opens at the Ruth Benzacar Gallery in Buenos Aires, followed by LIMINAL. On July, he will become the first non-Chinese artist to occupy the entire exhibition space at the CAFAM (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing), China’s premiere museum, with the show The Confines of The Great Void.

Erlich began his professional career at 18 with a solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires and, after receiving several fellowships (El Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Fundación Antorchas), went on to study at the Core Program, an artist residency in Houston, Texas (Glassell School of Art, 1998); there, he developed his signature installations Swimming Pool and Living Room. In the year 2000, he participated in the Whitney Biennale with the work Rain, and in 2001 he became Argentina’s representative at the 49^thVenice Biennale with Swimming Pool, a landmark piece that is part of the permanent collection at The 21st Century Museum of Art of Kanazawa (Japan) and the Voorlinden Museum (Netherlands).

His public works include La Democracia del Símbolo, a joint intervention in the Obelisco monument and MALBA Museum that captivated the city of Buenos Aires in 2015; Maison Fond marked the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris and is on permanent display at the Gare du Nord (Nuit Blanche, 2015); the celebrated installation Bâtiment (Nuit Blanche, Paris, 2004) has been reproduced in countries across the globe (France, The UK, Australia, Japan, Argentina, Ukraine, Austria); in 2018, Ball Game was commissioned by the IOC to commemorate the Summer Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires. Port of Reflections has been exhibited at the MMCA (Seoul, Korea, 2014), at MUNTREF (Buenos Aires, 2016) and at the Neuberger Museum of Art (New York, 2017). Palimpsestis on permanent display at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (Kinare, Japan, 2018).

More than any artist working today, Leandro Erlich (1973, Buenos Aires) has created a body of sculpture and large installations over the past two decades in which the architectural appearance of the everyday functions as a type of perceptual trap, leading he unsuspecting viewer into a visual paradox that systematically defies what should be the rules and order of the material world. In Erlich’s parallel universe, stairs lead nowhere, elevators don’t stop at a destination, passive spectators become active participants, clouds take on physical characteristics, and the solidity of built space turns out to be a fleeting optical illusion.

Liminal is the first monographic survey exhibition of Erlich’s work throughout the American continent and brings together a selection of twenty-one installations, produced since 1996 to date. The title of the exhibition references a zone that exists at the threshold of another space, suggests a position of being on the verge of crossing over, or entering into, a specific destination or state of existence, but without ever fully getting there. To hover at the liminal edge of an experience suggests that one is perpetually caught between a prior reality that has been left behind, and a new reality beckoning at close range, but leaving us stranded if we were to linger.

The accumulated impact of experiencing multiple Erlich works within a single exhibition setting is that it leaves us with an intensified awareness of this inherent duality, wondering under what circumstances we can ever confidently assert that we are ever truly here or there.

This effect requires a believable simulation of everyday life, and to that end the sequence of works on view carries explicit connotations of quotidian existence: clouds, the subway, a classroom, the sidewalk, a pool, a beauty parlor, one’s neighbors, doors, a vase of flowers. Despite appearances, however, each work contains underpinnings of the uncanny, in which the viewer experiences a mild shock, because something that cannot possibly be real is nonetheless revealed as just as ordinary and matter-of-fact as the predictable phenomenon one was anticipating.

Curator: Dan Cameron, Curator in Chief, New Museum, New York (1995-2005).

Visit the exhibition on MALBA’s website