SÈTE.- The exhibition Plastic Newspaper at the Crac Occitanie is the third instalment of a travelling project that began in September 2024 at Z33 in Hasselt (Belgium), and then moved to fjk3 —Contemporary Art Space in Vienna (Austria) in 2025. In this cycle, Lucy McKenzie examines the first forms of mass entertainment that appeared in the modern era. She explores their formal and cultural inventions that contributed to transforming everyday life into a permanent spectacle—such as painted panoramas, and sites devoted to art, science, and entertainment, where playful experiences and the rise of mass spectatorship converge.

Lucy McKenzie was born in 1977 in Glasgow (Scotland). She lives and works in Brussels. She studied at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee (Scotland), then specialised in trompe-l’œil at the Institut Supérieur de Peinture Van der Kelen Logelain in Brussels (Belgium). There she learned the foundations of decorative painting: preparation of surfaces, imitation of natural materials like marble and wood, and the play of ornamental illusion.

The artist works in the wider field of painting—often figurative and conceptual. Her appropriation practice aims to establish dialogue between seemingly antagonistic techniques and forms of knowledge, and to highlight the distinctiveness of these forms—be they from the realms of technique (traditional and contemporary), design, sculpture, underground cultures, or mass media.

As is often the case in Lucy McKenzie’s work, private experience confronts public space. She produces two train carriages in which visitors can sit down, converse, kiss, and endlessly observe the painted landscape mounted on a mechanical drum.

The monumental work The Faux Sports Shop —a life-sized fictional shopfront—is produced by Atelier E.B, an independent and critical fashion label created in 2011 by Lucy McKenzie and designer Beca Lipscombe. The work is dedicated to the collections of Atelier E.B and evokes the art of window dressing and the new mass culture that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century: shopping. The duo develops locally produced collections, using artisanal methods. They make use of alternative distribution circuits, particularly relying on art and institutional networks.

Each exhibition features a context-specific display of garments in The Faux Sports Shop. At the Crac Occitanie, the display consists of co¢on jersey designs developed in collaboration with the Portuguese brand index®.

Since 2019, through research conducted within Atelier E.B, Lucy McKenzie has been developing experimental work around mannequins. She invents figures whose poses and appearances contrast with the standardisation of capitalism’s commodified bodies.
She has developed a series of assemblages made with plastic bodies, to which she a¢aches the sculpted face of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, an icon of the Soviet resistance, executed by German forces in 1941 at the age of eighteen. The figure is
an iconographic and political hybrid.

In Leaning Mannequin (Roman Statue / l’Orage) (2021), she is dressed in a reproduction of a 1920s dress designed by Madeleine Vionnet. She is covered in an aubergine tone—a reference to Roman marbles. Her eyebrows, her lips and the whites of her eyes are yellow like a Pompeii statue. She is leaning back against the wall, as if resting.

All of the sculptures in this series inhabit the exhibition space as if it were a street.

The sculpture Duchamp Mannequin, 1938 (I) (2025) ), is a critique of the use of mannequins in art, particularly by the Surrealists. Lucy McKenzie appropriates the gesture of Marcel Duchamp, who, for the 1938 Exposition internationale du
surréalisme, dressed his mannequin in his own clothes rather than present it nude or dismember it, as was often done.

For the exhibition in Sète, Lucy McKenzie continues this reflection by borrowing wax models from Dr Spitzner’s anatomical museum (housed at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montpellier)—a collection of casts that were presented in the late nineteenth century at a museum on Paris’s Place Château d’Eau (now Place de la République), before becoming a travelling fairground attraction in 1885.

The purpose of that museum was to present the secrets of the human body and show skin diseases, particularly venereal diseases. It was a place of instruction, science, curiosity and amusement. McKenzie chose to include in the exhibition an "anatomical Venus" and a "Venus in childbirth", as well as the head of a trepanned man. These objects are transgressive because they combine education and voyeurism, clearly playing with the boundaries between arousal, morality and
terror.

The exhibition title, Plastic Newspaper, is a metaphor borrowed from historian Vanessa R. Schwartz [1] to conceptualise new media of the modern period that assembled visual, sonic, and spatial content, such as the Musée Grévin—an offshoot of the popular press—which produced three-dimensional tableaux in order to show the facts of “real life”. This process of writing and reconstruction is also found in Lucy McKenzie’s narrative fresco practice.

She is presenting two monumental pieces. Mural Proposal for Jeffrey Epstein’s New York Townhouse (Filming of American Psycho), a printed reproduction of a mural inspired by Mary Harron’s film American Psycho (2000), is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis. The main character, flamboyant golden boy Patrick Bateman, becomes a killer out of boredom and for the pleasure of transgression. For this work, Lucy McKenzie took inspiration from an anecdote: during filming, women on the set stopped working to watch Christian Bale (playing Patrick Bateman), nude for the shower scene. By proposing this mural for the house of Jeffrey Epstein—sex trafficker, rapist and child abuser, and a symbol of the impunity of elites— Lucy McKenzie reverses the direction of the gaze, and therefore that of power.

For the second mural, titled Cromwell Place (Francis Bacon’s Studio), the artist drew inspiration from gatherings that took place at Francis Bacon’s London studio, where he hosted secret after-hours gambling parties, transforming his home-studio into an illegal casino. The neighbourhood, Mayfair, was home to many illegal gambling clubs at that time. It was where the elite class who destabilised the economy with their venture capitalism came to relax . The reversal of the gaze and of power is a form of knowledge that Marie Canet partly attributes to Lucy McKenzie’s experience in pornography. At the age of eighteen, while still a student, she posed nude for New York photographer Richard Kern.

In the exhibition at fjk3 in Vienna—the project’s second stage—the artist presented some pornographic magazines opened to the page on which she appears.
As in Sète, they were installed in a display case near a large portrait of architect Adolf Loos created by artist and political dominatrix Reba Maybury. Lucy McKenzie also includes the business card that the architect gave to working-class girls he sought to abuse. He was convicted in 1928 of child sexual abuse, and was suspected of human traffic.

Plastic Newspaper is Lucy McKenzie’s first solo exhibition in France.

Featuring work by artist Reba Maybury and designer Beca Lipscombe.