Leandro Erlich

Do you believe what you see? After being presented in Tokyo, Miami and Milan, an exhibition devoted to Leandro Erlich arrives in France for the first time at the Grand Palais on 2 June 2026 at 8 a.m. From one work to another, perspectives shift, architectures come unraveled and reality is transformed before your eyes. Familiar with public-space installations, Leandro Erlich investigates the mechanisms of perception. At the crossroads of installation, sculpture and architecture, his immersive works—designed at human scale—take the form of devices that you activate by your presence. By moving through them and observing, each visitor participates in the experience. The artist draws on techniques borrowed from sleight of hand and trompe-l’œil: mirrors, deceptive appearances, plays of scale and perspective. Starting from everyday elements, he creates situations that unsettle landmarks and reshape our relationship to space.

Devised with curator Fabrice Bousteau, the exhibition unfolds as a progressive route made up of fourteen installations: levitating boats, weightless clouds, modernist architectures transformed into labyrinths, and even a Haussmannian building tipped onto its side that can be climbed. Created especially for this retrospective, several installations play with an inversion of viewpoint. Thus, what is seen from the outside is transformed once you are inside. Perspectives shift, reference points waver. Punctuated by artistic, literary and architectural references, the route also traces the artist’s trajectory and questions the way we perceive reality.

"In the mirror, I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up virtually behind the surface; I am over there, where I am not, a kind of shadow that gives me my own visibility, that allows me to look at myself where I am absent — the utopia of the mirror." Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, lecture, 1967; text published in Dits et Écrits, 1978.