Leandro Erlich

Xippas Punta del EsteXippas Geneva

Born 1973 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Leandro Erlich lives and works in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

In his work, Leandro Erlich borrows situations of everyday life by extruding objects such as the elevator, the door or even an entire building from their original context. Through the use of trompe l’oeil, mirrors and double bottoms, he reverses the vision of the world by playing with reality : he transforms the banal into an unusual space. Fascinated by the infinite, the observed subject is always reversed, building a timeless imaginary dimension that takes us into places with unstable borders.The artist’s installations question our relationship to what we see and what we believe in. Rarely a simple viewer, the visitor is encouraged to become an actor in the work. His fascination for distorted dimensions allows the public to immerse in a unique and collective experience.

Leandro Erlich participated at the Whitney Biennale in 2000 and represented Argentina at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) with his installation Swimming Pool, which earned him international recognition. Today, this work is part of the permanent collection of the Kanazawa Museum in Japan (along with Infinite Staicase) and of the Voorlinden Museum in Netherlands.

His monumental piece Bâtiment, first created for the Parisian Nuit Blanche in 2004, is currently presented at 104 in Paris for the Foire Foraine d’Art Contemporain, has toured the world from France to Japan, passing through Australia, Argentina and Ukraine.

He received the UNESCO Award (Istanbul, 2001), El Premio Leonardo (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, 2000), el Fondo Nacional de las Artes (Buenos Aires, 1992). In 2006, he was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. In 2017, he received The Roy Neuberger Award.

Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include Liminal at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami (2022); travellingt exhibition A Tensão currently on view at Centro Cultural Banco Do Brasil in Brasilia, after Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo, Brazil; Seeing is not Believing at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston (2022); Bâtiment at Nodeul Island in Seoul, South Korea (2022).

Leandro Erlich’s work is present in different public collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou (France), the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (USA), the Tate Modern (London, UK), the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (Italy) or the Museum Voorliden of Wasenaar (Netherlands).