Lionel Pennings, The Heist

© Lionel Pennings

For his new exhibition at the Serres du Botanique, Lionel Pennings delves into the aesthetics of burglary, presented as a sculptural exploration. Drawing inspiration from stories of hold-ups and heist films that shape the collective imagination of theft, The Heist offers an aesthetic experience of theft as an absurd object, blending poetry and humor in its vision.

The project is built around several key themes: spatial signage, display cases, support and hanging devices, and, not least, the objects themselves alongside the burglar’s iconic tools. These elements converge in a daring hybridity, where the interplay of substance, shape, and scale dissolves the boundaries between function and fiction.

By offering an aesthetic experience rooted in the concept of theft, The Heist employs a plastic vocabulary in which the forms both provoke thought and entertain. Broken display cases—or those designed to be broken into—, the burglar's tools, and the stone bas-reliefs become museum artifacts transformed into narrative objects, reflecting a dialogue between preservation and intrusion.