The place one sees a typical freeway bridge, a avenue lamp or a street signal, Mark Leckey sees one thing extraordinary – a gateway into the ecstatic, transcendence past the self. Working throughout video, sculpture, and efficiency, the British artist transforms the mundane into magic, linking music, dance and the heart beat of a metropolis to the chic.
In Paris, Lafayette Anticipations presents As Above So Under, Leckey’s newest solo exhibition. Spanning from the late Nineties to right now, audiences will see from the cult-classic British youth movie Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) to more moderen works like Mercy I Cry Metropolis (2024), and 20 some works in between. Centered on the theme of ecstasy and the ecstatic, the present is sensible of the artist’s personal disorienting experiences – moments of overwhelming emotion that loosened his footing in actuality.
Acidic in some locations and holy in others, the presentation displays on Leckey’s fascination with the Center Ages, notably the cosmic hyperlink between the earthly and the divine, the seen and the unseen, discovering echoes of this in right now’s world, the place smartphones and synthetic intelligence imbue objects with a mystical animacy.
“Ecstasy in its unique which means is being taken out of your self, pulled out of the acquainted and the knowable in a bewildering, terrifying, or I suppose superior manner,” the artist advised Artwork Basel in a current interview. “That looks like the entire world in the mean time. The entire world is type of within the throes of ecstasy.”
As Above So Under is now on view in Paris by means of July 20.
Lafayette Anticipations
9 Rue du Plâtre,
75004 Paris, France
