Mark Leckey: And the City Stood in its Brightness

Curator: Lekha Hileman

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 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.

In the installation, the sculpture becomes part of an imagined story whose temporal rhythm is defined by a six-minute loop of sound and light composed by the artist. The ambient soundtrack—built from layered fragments of found audio, music, and occasional voices—unfolds like a drifting current, punctuated by sudden intrusions of speech or melody. Its progression is mirrored in a shifting cycle of light that moves from the break of day until twilight. At the midpoint, an intense strobe coincides with the soundtrack’s crescendo, briefly flooding the gallery in an almost blinding glare. Projected directly onto the sculpture, the lighting animates its surfaces and transforms it from a solid object into a flickering apparition. Together, these immaterial elements—sound and light—structure the work’s narrative arc and atmosphere, enveloping viewers in a charged, temporal space that oscillates between revelation and erasure.

The installation envisions how physical space, sound, and light converge with intangible forces—digital systems, or transcendental experience—to evoke 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.