From 12 October 2024, the world will be upside down at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. The moon stands on the earth, a house hangs high above the ground, clouds lie on the floor and visitors seem to float in the weightlessness of a spaceship. Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich (*1973) transforms the exhibition hall into a fantastically surreal cosmos and plays with our notions of perspective and gravity. His sometimes large-scale installations seem to suspend the laws of physics and open up new perspectives on the diverse connections between science, technology, ecology, space travel and migration. The exhibition, which is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Germany, was, like most of his works, specially conceived for the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
Image above: Leandro Erlich, Pulled by the Roots, 2015, ortsspezifische Installation in Karlsruhe, produziert vom ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe im Rahmen der Ausstellung GLOBALE und des 300-jährigen Jubiläums der Stadt Karlsruhe, Courtesy of Leandro Erlich Studio © Leandro Erlich Studio, Foto: Leandro Erlich Studio
‘In all my works, reality shows itself in different ways. What we see is always a question of perception, the strongest facet of reality. There is an implicit aspect of both the understanding and the construction of what we call ‘real’. Each work is a reflection on the architecture of this realism.’ Leandro Erlich
WEIGHTLESS JOURNEY THROUGH SPACE
Leandro Erlich transforms the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg into a black box that reverses familiar perspectives and invites visitors to dream and imagine. The spectacular large-scale sculpture Moon (2024) rises as a half-dome with a diameter of almost twenty metres and a height of around twelve metres above the museum floor. Visitors can walk inside the sculpture and experience a projection of various star constellations and brightly lit cities and their street networks in another dome. Accompanied by spherical sounds, the multimedia installation condenses into an immersive 360° panorama. Visitors can also climb to the surface of the moon via a staircase and view the entire exhibition space from this elevated position.
‘The turning point that I find interesting about the illusion is the creation of doubt; in this way, the illusion can promote critical thinking.’
Leandro Erlich
Next to the sculpture Moon, a spaceship is ready for take-off in the exhibition hall. Visitors can enter the approximately 13-metre-high sculpture Spaceship (2024) and succumb to the illusion of floating like astronauts in the weightlessness of space via several mirrors. But here, too, nothing is as it seems at first glance. Instead of the starry night sky, the tip of the spaceship points to a 36 x 36 metre digitally generated fictitious landscape (Soprattutto, 2024), as we know it from cartography or satellite images. High above the visitors’ heads, the image is stretched out below the entire museum ceiling, like an upside-down world. With its fields, roads and structures, it illustrates how the topography of the earth’s surface has been shaped by humans in the Anthropocene.
INTERACTION BETWEEN MAN AND NATURE
Below Soprattutto, another large sculpture hovers at a lofty height: Pulled by the Roots (2015/2024). As an allegory for home and homelessness, the uprooted house is a reminder of current refugee and migration movements and the millions of people who have lost their homes due to wars, political conflicts, undignified living conditions or the worsening climate catastrophe. At the same time, the floating house with its imposing roots emphasises that man-made architecture is an integral part of the designed environment and in turn has far-reaching consequences for nature – from the consumption of natural resources to the emission of climate-damaging substances during processing.
The multi-part work The Cloud (2018-2022) also deals with the relationship between heaven and earth, above and below, inside and outside. The artist captures supposedly fleeting clouds in four display cases and ‘preserves’ them for museum presentation. The individual showcase objects each consist of several printed glass panes, which, stacked one behind the other, invite the viewer to freely associate forms – like looking at the play of clouds in the sky. Only on closer inspection do animals or the outlines of South America become visible in Erlich’s cloud paintings.
‘I am fascinated by the human ability to construct reality.’
Leandro Erlich
Accompanying programme
The exhibition is accompanied by a varied supporting programme: From an artist talk with Leandro Erlich to a talk with astronaut Insa Thiele-Eich on 26 March 2025
a wide range of events are planned during the exhibition period. The museum formats that are particularly
Art & Cocktail, Eat & Art and special themed tours such as Facts & Lies, which are particularly popular with the young
Facts & Lies will be continued
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 12 October 2024 – Saturday, 13 July 2025
Artist talk: Tuesday, 25 March 2025
WHERE?
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Hollerpl. 1
38440 Wolfsburg
