PAMM: Erlich 2022-2023

Art Dependence Magazine: What role should the audience experience of your work have in creating the meaning? Is it important for the audience to physically interact with the pieces and in a sense, become part of the art?

Leandro Erlich: I like to distort the familiar in a way that anyone is able to relate to a work. There is a certain playfulness in using a mirror for likeness, but it also hints the idea of being more metaphorical. If you try to capture a reflection on water, you are trying to fix what is inherently variant. If you can’t find your reflection in a mirror, the action itself challenges the empirical proof of your own existence. By design, there is no complete work without the audience. In my work, the audience temporarily becomes an element of the work itself. Their individual participation and experience is a level of involvement that makes them essential to the process. And of course, the ultimate meaning they create and assign is also imperative.

ArtDependence Magazine interview with Leandro Erlich from 08 December 2017

PAMM – PEREZ ART MUSEUM MIAMI
“Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is a modern and contemporary art museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting international art of the 20th and 21st centuries.”
https://www.pamm.org/en/about/

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1103 Biscayne Blvd.
Miami, FL 33132
Telephone: 305.375.3000
https://www.pamm.org/en/

LEANDRO ERLICH: LIMINAL
22 NOVEMBER 2022 – 04 SEPTEMBER 2023

“Since the late 1990s, Erlich (b. 1973, Buenos Aires, lives in Buenos Aires) has created a highly distinctive body of sculptures and site-specific installations in which the architectural appearance of the everyday functions as a perceptual trap, leading an unsuspecting viewer into a visual paradox that systematically defies certain laws and attributes of the material world. In Erlich’s parallel universe, stairs lead nowhere, elevators don’t stop at any destination, passive spectators become active participants, clouds take on physical characteristics, and the solidity of constructed spaces turns out to be a fleeting optical illusion. Liminal has been conceived as a sequence of spaces that one might encounter in the course of an ordinary day: elevator, subway, classroom, hair salon, sidewalk, swimming pool, laundry room—even a window through which the neighbors’ windows can be seen. Each space is fabricated to serve as a precise simulation of the place it references, so that the encounter with Erlich’s illusion tends to occur as a surprise on the viewer’s part that such an ordinary spot should conceal such extraordinary qualities.The exhibition’s title refers to a transitional zone located at the threshold of another space, and indirectly suggests being on the verge of crossing over, or entering into, a new destination or state of existence—a sensation reinforced in Erlich’s work. To hover at the liminal edge of an experience suggests being caught between a prior reality that has been left behind, and a new reality beckoning at close range, but always slightly beyond our grasp. Erlich’s work suggests that despite our collective pride at being able to instinctually locate ourselves within the physical world, the truth is that most of us are engaged in an extended game of probability and chance, in which situations that can only be real within our dreams cast a spell of enchantment over our waking lives. The accumulated impact of experiencing multiple Erlich works within a single exhibition tends to leave viewers with an intensified awareness of this inherent duality about daily life.” https://www.pamm.org/en/exhibition/leandro-erlich-liminal/

LEANDRO ERLICH BIOGRAPHY
Leandro Erlich was born in Argentina in 1973. 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^th Venice 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). As a conceptual artist, his work explores the perceptual bases of reality and our capacity to interrogate these same foundations through a visual framework. The architecture of the everyday is a recurring theme in Erlich’s art, aimed at creating a dialogue between what we believe and what we see, just as he seeks to close the distance between the museum or gallery space and daily experience.” Leandro Erlich official website

PHOTOS OF EXHIBITION