Artists

Lucas Leffler

Press release

For his second solo exhibition at Lee-Bauwens Gallery, Lucas Leffler (b. 1993, Belgium) takes this moment as a point of departure for a new series of hybrid photographic works. Under a radiant sun, on 30 June 2007, Building 9 of Kodak Park in Rochester, New York, was brought down by implosion. Some three thousand people, mostly Rochester residents and former Kodak employees, gathered to watch, at a time when the company had already cut 25,000 jobs. Using the media event to promote its new digital line, the industrial giant captioned its own collapse Nice Day for a Revolution. For his second solo exhibition at Lee-Bauwens Gallery, Lucas Leffler turns to this pivotal moment, taking it as the starting point for a series of works built on hybrid photographic techniques. Developed in residence at PICTO and Musée Nicéphore Niépce, with works produced by Le Fresnoy, this exhibition is combining the alteration of advertising archives with the recycling of technological waste. Questioning the disruptive model driven by technological change, the project explores the material that ruins leave behind. This new solo exhibition extends Constellation of Nitrate, presented at the gallery in 2024 around the Zilverbeek project, and continues Leffler's investigation into the great industrial names of the photographic age: Agfa-Gevaert & Kodak. Writing on that work, art historian Gwennaëlle Gribaumont, critic for Arts Libre and Collect AAA, described a "poet, magician and scientist, carrying the reproduction of the image into untamed territory". She read the work as a modern fable about the passage from one state to another and traced the artist fascination with the materiality of photography back to his experience as a lab technician, and his attachment to industry to a childhood spent near the Burgo Ardennes paper mill in the Gaume region, an unexpected industrial panorama that left a lasting imprint. Lucas Leffler is a photographer and visual artist. Rooted in a photographic practice, his work explores the materiality of the image in the digital age and its relationship to memory. Industrial ruin and the obsolescence of techniques occupy a central place in his research, shaped by working-class origins and technical studies in photography. Deeply engaged with historical processes, Leffler brings an ecological dimension to his practice, combining material recycling with a low-tech approach. His works, often inspired by news items or minor events, tend to evoke narrative forms in which primitive ruins intersect with post-technological imaginaries. Lucas Leffler lives and works in Brussels. He holds a master degree from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (BE) and a post-master from Le Fresnoy, Studio National. His work has been exhibited at the Musée de l'Élysée in Switzerland, FOMU and Contretype in Belgium, Fotohof in Austria, and the BnF in France. His first book, Zilverbeek (Silver Creek), was published in 2019 by The Eriskay Connection. His next publication will be released with RVB Books in spring 2027. Lucas Leffler also won the 2022 PICTO LAB / Expérimenter l'image prize. In parallel to the Lee-Bauwens Gallery exhibition, Lucas also exhibits in Hangar, Brussels, as one of the five laureates of the Belgian open call, shown alongside 15 projects commissioned by the French Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), and part of the bicentenary of photography. Called Reinventing Photography, the collective exhibition will be running from 17.09 to 20.12.2026, https://www.hangar.art