in situ: Mark Leckey. And the City Stood in its Brightness
11.14.2025 - 04.12.2026
Mark Leckey. And the City Stood in its Brightness is the second exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s in situ series, a program that invites artists to create site-specific works in dialogue with the gallery’s architecture. Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) imagines the intersections of popular culture, technology, and collective memory, recontextualizing historical imagery to spark a dialogue between past and present. His work reflects on nostalgia and class, probing how media and technology shape our sense of identity and belonging.
Growing up near Liverpool during the late 1970s and 1980s, Leckey came of age amid the collapse of Britain’s industrial heartlands and the social rifts that followed. Factories closed, communities fractured, and mass culture—broadcast through television and advertising—became a new kind of landscape. This atmosphere of upheaval and mediation shaped his fascination with how images, sounds, and technologies construct shared imagination and belonging.
For this exhibition, Leckey takes inspiration from Sassetta’s City by the Sea (1424), among the earliest cityscapes in Western art where the city itself becomes the subject. The painting depicts a fortified medieval city on a hillside, rendered in a geometrically complex yet flattened plane. Leckey observes: “The city transcends the laws of physics; it is of the past and of the future.” His interpretation moves from two-dimensional image to sculptural form, inhabiting the threshold between material reality and the immaterial realm—the real and the imaginary.
Projected onto the gallery walls is an image of a figure that seems both man and beast, wandering beyond the city’s edge. The figure draws inspiration from William Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar (1795–ca. 1805), an image of a man cast down, suspended between
the human and the animal, the earthly and the otherworldly.
The installation envisions how physical space, sound, and light converge with intangible forces—digital systems, artificial intelligence, or transcendental experience—to evoke a shifting sense of transformation and instability. By intertwining material and immaterial elements, Leckey creates a space where the visible and the invisible collide, offering an encounter that is at once immediate, uncanny, and transcendent.
Galleries: 204, 208
Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller
Mark Leckey
Installation view, O’ Magic Power of Bleakness, Tate Britain, London, 24 September - 5 January 2020
Photograph by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist, Cabinet Gallery London, and Tate.