Mark Leckey's 'As Above So Below' Brings Visions of Ecstasy to Paris
On view at Lafayette Anticipations through July 20.
Where one sees a typical highway bridge, a street lamp or a road sign, Mark Leckey sees something extraordinary – a gateway into the ecstatic, transcendence beyond the self. Working across video, sculpture, and performance, the British artist transforms the mundane into magic, linking music, dance and the pulse of a city to the sublime.
In Paris, Lafayette Anticipations presents As Above So Below, Leckey’s latest solo exhibition. Spanning from the late 1990s to today, audiences will see from the cult-classic British youth film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) to more recent works like Mercy I Cry City (2024), and 20 some works in between. Centered on the theme of ecstasy and the ecstatic, the show makes sense of the artist’s own disorienting experiences – moments of overwhelming emotion that loosened his footing in reality.
Acidic in some places and holy in others, the presentation reflects on Leckey’s fascination with the Middle Ages, particularly the cosmic link between the earthly and the divine, the seen and the unseen, finding echoes of this in today’s world, where smartphones and artificial intelligence imbue objects with a mystical animacy.
“Ecstasy in its original meaning is being taken out of yourself, pulled out of the familiar and the knowable in a bewildering, terrifying, or I guess awesome way,” the artist told Art Basel in a recent interview. “That feels like the whole world at the moment. The whole world is kind of in the throes of ecstasy.”
As Above So Below is now on view in Paris through July 20.
Lafayette Anticipations
9 Rue du Plâtre,
75004 Paris, France
