Lucy McKenzie presents Super Palace at Z33

Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture will present the first large institutional solo exhibition in Belgium of the Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie, who has been based in Brussels since 2006. Lucy McKenzie will exhibit across two floors and 900m² of Z33’s new exhibition wing Vleugel 19, designed by Francesca Torzo and conceived as a microcosm of the city. The artist will respond to the building’s distinctive architectural volumes with a series of scenes that echo public and semi-public spaces ‒ including a shopping street, a train station and a fairground ‒ as well as focusing on domestic space.

25 September 2024

As a painter, McKenzie is interested in how the medium operates within the broad spectrum of visual communication. By applying painting to figures and objects, and using it as a monumental backdrop akin to both political murals and commercial advertising, she examines the functions and frictions of these different genres. By taking objects shaped by subcultures, the mass media, local traditions and the international avant-garde, she aims to explore their repercussions on art, folk culture and leisure as they respond to the shifting pattern of political and social change.

McKenzie’s exhibition will feature several major new commissions, including works inspired by the mid- to late-19th-century craze for moving panoramas – a progenitor to cinema and immersive entertainment of the 20th and 21st centuries. On the ground floor, the core of the exhibition comprises a series of new works that emulate these panoramas – painted scenic backdrops that moved on a canvas roll presenting a journey or narrative to a static public. McKenzie focuses on those that were viewed from rooms decorated as 1^st-class train cabins, and which were popular at amusement parks and World Fairs (in this case using reclaimed elements of Belgian trains). This ride was a primitive precursor to spectacular culture. It is a form that is simultaneously painting, sculpture and durational art, and, like many fairground rides, a clandestine meeting space in an era of strict social control. The painted landscape viewed out of the window of the train cabin is both the pretext and accompaniment for the personal interactions within.

A large vintage dance organ is included for the duration of the exhibition. As with the panorama, the mechanical organ (this one produced by the famed Decap brothers from Antwerp) is an example of a form familiar to us now as seminal to artificial/digital culture. Using punch cards like those found on the jacquard loom, these organs were found in the small provincial dance halls and social clubs of Belgium till the mid-1950s. Highly prized as nostalgic vernacular and the ancestors of contemporary electronic music, some of them are still in use today.

The gallery in the entrance to the museum, with its narrow footprint and vertiginous height, was designed to echo the curve and proportions of the street outside. Here is displayed the façade of an imaginary boutique whose windows are dressed with the designs of Atelier E.B, the design project and fashion brand run by McKenzie in collaboration with the designer Beca Lipscombe. The pejorative understanding of the expression ‘just window dressing’ is challenged here by treating the shallow space of the shop vitrine as a sculptural form. For their window displays Atelier E.B collaborate with professional window dressers to highlight the interconnectivity of craft forms across disciplines.

The inclusion of a group of new paintings continues the artist’s interest in mural art. Several are inspired by anecdotal narratives around the filming of American Psycho (2000) and the private gambling den run by Francis Bacon and his nanny in London in the 1940s and ’50s. By using the stylistically recognizable form of the political fresco paintings of the Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera, the artist continues her interrogation of style, ideology and hierarchy.

Throughout the show McKenzie revisits and recontextualizes existing works: a monumental modernist streetlamp is reworked with added sketches while billboards made for the London underground in 2020 are hung in the staircase of the Z33 to accentuate the architecture’s civic atmosphere. Commercial mannequins are reconfigured, given a faux finish to appear like verdigris bronze, and placed on plinths like statues.

As a counterpoint, part of the upper floor of Z33 is devoted to reflecting domestic spaces and interiors. This includes a screening of the video Nahredniki, 2023, which is constructed from a 1990s Czech period drama set in the Villa Mueller, the modernist masterwork of fin-de-siècle architect Adolf Loos, and on which the artist has imprinted her own narrative.

Bio

Lucy McKenzie (born 1977, Scotland, UK) attended Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee, Scotland (1995–99) and Institut Supérieur de Painter de Bruxelles Van der Kelen-Logelain, Brussels, Belgium (2007–08). Since 2007 Lucy McKenzie has collaborated with Beca Lipscombe on Atelier E.B. In 2020-2021, Prime Suspect, a mid-career retrospective of her work was co-organised by Museum Brandhorst (DE) and Tate Liverpool (UK) McKenzie’s selected exhibitions include Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, IT (2023); La Verrière, Brussels, BE (2022); Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, Italy (2017); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, US (2014); Lucy McKenzie, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, DE (2009); MoMA, New York City, US (2008). She is represented by Cabinet Gallery (UK) and Galerie Buchholz (DE/US).