Leo Mock: "There are kisses left undelivered": WINDOW, 91 Walker Street New York, NY (corner of Walker and Lafayette Street)
Current exhibition
Overview
Leo Mock
"To weave a wall to hem us in", 2025
Oil on linen
39 3/8 x 72 inches
(100 x 183 cm)
(100 x 183 cm)
Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present “There are kisses left undelivered”, an exhibition of six new cloud paintings by Leo Mock, at WINDOW (91 Walker Street). This marks the artist's second show with the gallery and opens on Friday, March 7, with a reception from 6–8 pm.
In Mock’s hands, WINDOW becomes a site for celestial metamorphosis, with street-viewers invited to peer in at unique, even transcendental scenes playing out among the clouds. We watch as they grow and bubble, tumble with surprising frenetic energy across the picture plane, float, and, ultimately, burst and dissipate. This new series serves as a meditation on movement and impermanence, with Mock’s hazy forms suspended again and again across a changing sky.
The world in Mock’s paintings is familiar but alien—unmistakably different from our own despite sharing near-earthly horizon lines, mountain formations, and light-filled skies. The building blocks of each landscape are taken from our Earth, but are rearranged and reconfigured to make something new. The main difference is color, and the second is atmosphere: reds and greens permeate from above, and bubble gum pink clouds hurtle across an onyx sky without adhering to the laws of physics. His pink clouds go so far as to hover dangerously close to the earth—in both “You want to hear echos" (2025) and "To Mend The Tear That Always Shows" (2025) pieces of them seem to be sheared off, becoming razor-thin C-shaped curves that cling to dirty ground.
Rendered in a palette that is at once muddy and vivid, these surreal atmospheres evoke the works of Mock’s artistic predecessors, particularly the low horizon lines of Yves Tanguy and the agoraphobic, deserted landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico. These influences are woven into his repeated investigations of the world, creating a new space uniquely Mock, one that is cosmically charged, fantastical, and deeply introspective.
In Mock’s hands, WINDOW becomes a site for celestial metamorphosis, with street-viewers invited to peer in at unique, even transcendental scenes playing out among the clouds. We watch as they grow and bubble, tumble with surprising frenetic energy across the picture plane, float, and, ultimately, burst and dissipate. This new series serves as a meditation on movement and impermanence, with Mock’s hazy forms suspended again and again across a changing sky.
The world in Mock’s paintings is familiar but alien—unmistakably different from our own despite sharing near-earthly horizon lines, mountain formations, and light-filled skies. The building blocks of each landscape are taken from our Earth, but are rearranged and reconfigured to make something new. The main difference is color, and the second is atmosphere: reds and greens permeate from above, and bubble gum pink clouds hurtle across an onyx sky without adhering to the laws of physics. His pink clouds go so far as to hover dangerously close to the earth—in both “You want to hear echos" (2025) and "To Mend The Tear That Always Shows" (2025) pieces of them seem to be sheared off, becoming razor-thin C-shaped curves that cling to dirty ground.
Rendered in a palette that is at once muddy and vivid, these surreal atmospheres evoke the works of Mock’s artistic predecessors, particularly the low horizon lines of Yves Tanguy and the agoraphobic, deserted landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico. These influences are woven into his repeated investigations of the world, creating a new space uniquely Mock, one that is cosmically charged, fantastical, and deeply introspective.
Installation Views
Works
