Nationality British Spouse(s) Lizzie Carey-Thomas Movies Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore | Name Mark Leckey Role Artist | |
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Known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore(1999)Industrial Light and Magic (2008) | ||
Artist talk mark leckey and patrizia dander
Mark Leckey (born 1964 in Birkenhead, Wirral) is a British artist, working with collage art, music and video. His Found art and found footage pieces span several videos, most notably Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Industrial Light and Magic (2008), for which he won the 2008 Turner Prize. His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, in 2008 and at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2007. His performances have been presented in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, Abrons Arts Center; at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, both in 2009; and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2008.
Contents
- Artist talk mark leckey and patrizia dander
- Exhibition mark leckey as if
- Life and career
- Art career
- Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore 1999
- Sound System 2002
- Made in Eaven 2004
- Drunken Bakers 2006
- Felix Gets Broadcast 2007
- Industrial Light and Magic 2008
- GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction 2010
- BigBoxStatueAction 200311
- References
Exhibition mark leckey as if
Life and career
Leckey was born in Birkenhead, near Liverpool, in 1964. In a 2008 interview in The Guardian, he described how he grew up in a working-class family and became a ‘casual’ in his youth. His parents both worked for Littlewoods, the clothes store and betting company based in Liverpool. School, at a comprehensive in Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, was not a happy experience for Leckey. He left school at 15 with one O Level, in art, and at 19 became obsessed with learning about ancient civilizations. In the Guardian interview he described himself as an autodidact, "That's why I use bigger words than I should. It's a classic sign." Following a conversation with his stepfather he took his A Levels and went to an art college in Newcastle from 1987 to 1990, but didn’t enjoy it.
Leckey moved to New York in late 1995 and first returned to London in 1997. When Leckey made the video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore in 1999, he was living in a tiny flat in Windmill Street, in Fitzrovia. He formed the band donAteller with Ed Laliq, and had the first gig at the 414 Club in Brixton. Later band members includes Enrico David and Bonnie Camplin. He served as professor of film studies at the Städelschule, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany from 2005 to 2009. He lives in north London with his wife, Lizzie Carey-Thomas, a curator of contemporary art at the Serpentine Gallery, and their two-year-old daughter, April.
Art career
Mark Leckey's video work has as its subject the "tawdry but somehow romantic elegance of certain aspects of British culture," He likes the idea of letting "culture use you as an instrument." but adds that the pretentiousness that artists sometimes fall into is destructive to the artistic process: "What gets in the way is being too clever, or worrying about how something is going to function, or where it's going to be. When you start thinking of something as art, you're fucked: you're never going to advance." Matthew Higgs has described his work as “possess[ing] a strange nonartlike quality, operating, as it does, on the knife's edge where art and life meet." Leckey cited Erik Davis, the Californian cultural critic as a big influence. He classified himself as a pop artist.
He exhibited alongside Damien Hirst in the 1990 New Contemporaries exhibition at the ICA but afterwards dropped from view, before making a "comeback" with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore in 1999.
In 2004, he participated in Manifesta 5, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. In 2006 he participated in the Tate Triennial and his works are held in the collections of the Tate and the Centre Pompidou.
In 2013, Leckey toured the UK for his curatorial project, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, commissioned by the Hayward Gallery.
In the autumn of 2014, the Wiels contemporary art centre in Brussels staged a mid-career retrospective devoted to Leckey. The exhibition, named Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials, is Leckey’s largest exhibition to date. The title comes from a letter by