First it was Break Down, now it’s Breaking News. Rather than breaking up all his possessions as he did for his 2001 Art Angel commission, Michael Landy has now opened up the contents of his head and put a lifetime of ideas, associations and memories up for all to see. These mental outpourings—which Landy describes as “at the same time self-introspection and open-endedness”—were unveiled last night (2 October) and take the form of a multitude of meticulously rendered red and white drawings that cover the walls of his Hackney studio.
The personal, the political, the commercial and the art historical—including many references to Landy’s past works as well as those of his partner Gillian Wearing, who occupies the studio upstairs—float like wandering thoughts, all united by their red and white colour code. Among this swarm of multidimensional paper drawings, elements from Picasso’s Guernica abut a headline about Jeremy Corbyn; a remake of Robert Rauschenberg’s erased Willem de Kooning drawing sits alongside the Twitter symbol; some figures from Landy’s Scrapheap Services (1996) installation and a more recent sign for payday loans. There is also a mischievous, and thankfully premature, facsimile of an official letter from the Royal Academy of Arts chief executive Charles Saumarez-Smith declaring: “It is my painful duty to announce the death of Michael Landy RA on Monday 21 September 2015”. There is another one announcing: “Michael Landy is now representing Glenn Brown.”
“It’s a combination of disparate elements from the world, a bit like looking at the papers but also borrowing from 25 years of my career—all the references intermingle”, Landy says. The artist, with characteristic diligence, has spent the best part of the last year toiling every day in the self-same studio to make these hundreds of works. And certainly at last night’s opening there was a brisk demand for his intermingled references. The smallest pieces were selling for £250, and the prices increased according to the dimensions of the work. So here, size really is everything. And Thomas Dane Gallery’s François Chantala was being kept very busy with his tape measure…