Landy was born in London. He studied at Loughborough College of Art, 1981-83 and Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1985-88. He participated in the group exhibition Freeze, curated by fellow Goldsmiths student Damien Hirst in 1988, and in the East Country Yard Show curated by fellow Goldsmiths graduate Sarah Lucas in 1990. His first solo exhibition was in January 1989 at the Gray Art Gallery, New York, and his first solo exhibition in London was in September of that same year at Karsten Schubert Ltd.

Landy’s work has focused on the world of marketing and consumerism, commenting on the political and social climate in Britain over the last decade and a half. In 1990 he transformed a vast industrial space into an imaginary indoor market for his installation work simply titled Market. Completely devoid of produce, the installation used only the basic apparatus of display: tiered steel framed stalls with a fake grass covering, plastic crates and other items as used by London street traders, with video monitors playing film sequences of actual traders going about their daily business of setting up their stalls using the same materials. For his 1992 Closing Down Sale, he turned the Karsten Schubert gallery into a bargain shop with trolleys full of cheap consumer items and day-glo signs exclaiming such slogans as ‘Recession Sale’ and ‘Out of Business’. His installation Scrapheap Services, first shown in the exhibition Brilliant! New Art from London at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1996, had more obviously sinister overtones of redundancy and disposability in a ‘big brother’ state. For his most recent work Breakdown, presented over 14 days in a disused department store in the heart of the West End of London in February 2001, Landy systematically broke down every single thing he owned at that point in his life, over 7000 individual items, the ultimate statement on consumerism.

Further reading:
Kate Bush: Michael Landy: Market, One-Off Press, London, 1990
Michael Landy/Breakdown, an interview with Julian Stallabrass, Artangel, London, 2001

 

Glossary

  • Film

    A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Video

    Images recorded on videotape or on optical disc to be viewed on television screens, or projected onto screens. The medium through which these images are recorded and displayed.

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