Guillaume Leblon ‘There is a Man’

carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of recent works by the French artist Guillaume Leblon. This will be his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Leblon’s sculptural installations adopt a poetic relationship to space — embracing an active, mobile, open relationship with the world. Known for choreographing compelling spatial narratives, Leblon’s current exhibition exudes a potent sense of ephemerality and the uncanny.

A tension between absence and form pervades the exhibition. Upon entering the space, visitors will confront a foam carpet that covers the entire floor and the lower part of the wall. The delicate skin sheathing the space will accumulate traces of wear from the visitors’ movement over the course of the exhibition: a visible imprint of the absent human form. This interplay between absence and the body is a key motif that carries throughout the artist’s most recent work.

A blank face without features, detached arms without hands, a clothed torso. Each of these evocative sculptures comprises a sort of shell or envelope for an absent body, a hollow core that speaks to questions of memory, dreams, fragmentation, and possibility. This new body of work marks a transition in process and materials for Leblon. Over the years, the artist has shifted from working with found materials, remnants, and organic matter to foundry work in materials like aluminum, marble, and sand. Always invested in temporal concerns, Leblon sees this mutation in process as a transformation of the work’s relationship to time.

Leblon’s 3-D printed plastic sculptures will be accompanied by blown glass sculpture and a new series of collage. Leblon describes the collages as a connection between every day life and the news, a sort of portal between two worlds. Combining crumbled newspapers with paint, plastics, and everyday found objects these works bristle with an abject materiality.

text: Carlier Gebauer