Mark Leckey: And the City Stood in its Brightness

14 Nov 2025 – 04 Dec 2026
Bilbao, Spain
guggenheim-bilbao.eus
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‘And the City Stood in Its Brightness,’ the second commission in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s in situ series, features a new site-specific installation by Mark Leckey, who explores how popular culture, technology, and memory shape collective identity. Drawing on his upbringing near Liverpool during the industrial decline of the 1970s and ’80s, Leckey examines how images and media become shared emotional landscapes.

For this project, he reimagines Sassetta’s City by the Sea (1424), one of the earliest Western cityscapes, translating its otherworldly geometry into sculptural form. The installation unfolds through a six-minute loop of sound and light — ambient audio, sudden bursts of speech, shifting illumination, and a climactic strobe — that transforms the sculpture from a physical structure into a flickering apparition.

designboom has received this project from our event submissions feature, see more here.