LEANDRO ERLICH AT AMOS REX
- ARTISTIC HUB MAGAZINE
- Oct 29
- 2 min read
When Reality Loses Its Ground
The moment you step into Amos Rex in Helsinki, the familiar begins to shift. Walls bend, floors tilt, and what once seemed stable starts to move. The Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, one of the most captivating figures in contemporary installation art, invites visitors to question their own perception and to become part of what they see.
Open from 8 October 2025 to 6 April 2026, this exhibition marks Erlich’s first major presentation in Finland and the Nordic region. Known for blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined, Erlich builds architectural illusions that play with reflection, light, and perspective. The viewer is never a bystander but an essential participant.
His most celebrated work, “Bâtiment,” reappears in a new version inspired by Helsinki’s Katajanokka district. The façade of a building lies horizontally on the floor, while a vast mirror suspended above transforms the scene into a dreamlike moment where visitors appear to walk across walls. The work captures what defines Erlich’s practice: that delicate intersection between physical presence and optical play, between what is real and what we choose to believe.
The exhibition also features “The Cloud,” “Sidewalk,” “Lost Garden,” and “Elevator Maze.” Each transforms space in a different way, pulling the ground from beneath the viewer’s feet. “The Cloud” brings quiet poetry to the everyday through delicate, suspended forms of vapor and light. “Sidewalk” turns a city pavement into a mirror that inverts perspective. “Lost Garden” merges nature with the urban environment, while “Elevator Maze” creates an optical illusion of endless lifts, a spatial loop where orientation gently dissolves.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Erlich has spent more than two decades challenging how we see and move through the world. His installations have appeared at the Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1 in New York, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires. Although his language is architectural, what he builds is not architecture but experience. His work exists in the fragile space between vision and understanding.
At Amos Rex, that boundary becomes almost invisible. The museum’s distinctive underground architecture, punctuated by domes of natural light, provides a perfect setting for an artist who thrives on uncertainty, in that fleeting moment when perception shifts and the world quietly rearranges itself.
Leandro Erlich, Bâtiment, 2004/2025. Photo © Tuomas Uusheimo / Amos Rex
When you leave the exhibition, the world around you may look the same, yet something within you has shifted. For a brief moment, you begin to see how fragile the line is between what exists and what you believe to exist. In that realization, Leandro Erlich’s art becomes not an illusion but a mirror of your own perception.
Exhibition: Leandro Erlich
Location: Amos Rex, Mannerheimintie 22–24, Helsinki
Dates: 8 October 2025 – 6 April 2026
Curators: Anastasia Isakova and Kai Kartio
