Lucy McKenzie: Super Palace

Z33 presents Super Palace, Lucy McKenzie’s first major exhibition in Belgium.

McKenzie’s work questions the role of art outside the museum, exploring its presence in fashion, architecture and the public space. She created Super Palace to complement the distinct architectural style of Z33’s new exhibition wing. McKenzie sees the building as a reflection of the city: as a place where public and private spaces converge. On the ground floor, the installations are reminiscent of a shopping street, a train station and a fairground, while the artworks upstairs represent more domestic settings.

Super Palace features ambitious new commissions, including works inspired by the mid- to late-19th-century craze for moving panoramas—a progenitor to cinema and the immersive entertainment of the 20th and 21st centuries. At the core of the exhibition are two 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 1st-class train cabins, and which were popular at amusement parks and World Fairs. 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 inclusion of another group of new paintings continues McKenzie’s interest in mural art. These works 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.

Biography
Lucy McKenzie (Glasgow, UK, 1977) has lived and worked in Brussels for the past eighteen years. She studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee, Scotland from 1995 to 1999 and at Institut Supérieur de Peinture Van der Kelen-Logelain in Brussels from 2007 to 2008. There, she learned traditional decorative painting techniques such as wood and marble imitation, patina application and trompe-l’oeil painting. She combines a conceptual approach to art with traditional craftsmanship, blurring the boundaries between artistic genres.

McKenzie has held solo exhibitions at renowned museums such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Ludwig in Cologne and MoMA in New York. Prime Suspect, a mid-career retrospective of her work, was exhibited at Museum Brandhorst in Munich and Tate Liverpool in 2020 and 2021.

McKenzie has collaborated with Beca Lipscombe on the fashion label Atelier E.B since 2011. They have presented their collections and installations at art institutes worldwide. From 2018 to 2020, their large-scale exhibition Passer-By was on tour at Serpentine Galleries in London, Lafayette Anticipations in Paris and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow.

Curator: Tim Roerig