MICHAEL LANDY, GILLIAN WEARING

Landy and Wearing both came to prominence in the 1990s after studying at Goldsmiths in London, where they first met, in the late 1980s. Landy’s early work from this period presented a satirical view on the political and social climate of neoliberal Britain, producing works and installations in various media that interrogated issues of labour, consumerism and value. These concerns led to the landmark work Break Down (2001), in which Landy and a group of assistants systematically destroyed each and every one of the artist’s 7,227 possessions over the course of two weeks, in an audacious performative act staged in a former C&A department store building on Oxford Street, London. In the aftermath of Break Down, a tabula rasa in a creative and personal sense, the first works Landy produced were delicate etchings of common weeds found around London – an apposite subject matter symbolic of survival and renewal – which became the Nourishment series (2002–ongoing). For this exhibition Landy presents a group of new etchings of weeds encountered in the derelict nooks and on the roadsides of Naples, made during several visits to the city in 2024. The meticulously intricate renderings honour the overlooked and celebrate resilience, in a poetic ode to the city itself.

In conversation with the etchings are works on paper from Landy’s recent Future Ruins series, depicting existing landmarks—including the grand Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome—in imaginary states of ecay. Referencing the long Western tradition of artists captivated by ruins both real and imagined, including the eighteenth century cultural craze for rediscovering and even recreating ‘decorative’ ruins in England and France, Landy’s future ruins plumb the political and emotional registers of the motif, with its embedded notions of value, history, loss and nostalgia.

In 2010 Landy was selected for a residency at the National Gallery in London, where he served as Associate Artist until 2012. He spent the first year of the residency looking at the gallery’s collection of over 2,300 works nearly every day. After an intense period of drawing, Landy began to make collages using hundreds of printouts of the paintings of old masters which he cut up, rearranged and stuck back together. These collages in turn led to the creation of ambitious large-scale, interactive kinetic sculptures designed to be activated by visitors, in the spirit of the playfulness of Jean Tinguely’s madcap, animated sculptural machines. This exhibition revisits Multi-Saint (2013), one of six sculptures from the residency, which references paintings by Carlo Crivelli, Ambrogio Bergognone, and Hans Memling, incorporating the attributes of Saint Michael, Saint Lawrence, Saint Catherine, Saint Peter and Saint Lucy.

For Art Lovers Landy has made a new kinetic sculpture modelled after the patron saint of Naples, San Gennaro, as depicted in an eighteenth-century painting by Italian painter Girolamo Pesce. Larger than life in more than one sense, Landy’s San Gennaro (2024) centres on the aura and spectacle of the martyr’s famed relic - his blood - held at the Naples Cathedral in a glass vial.

Wearing graduated from Goldsmiths in 1990 and held her first solo exhibition in 1993 at City Racing in South London. The exhibition presented work from her ground-breaking series Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–93), for which she approached people on the streets in London and asked them to write a personal phrase on a piece of paper, and then photographed them displaying their thoughts. Drawing the subjects into a relationship with the artist and artwork as both participant and collaborator, these portraits plumbed the connection between self expression, the confessional, private life and social belonging, themes that gain fresh poignancy in today’s world of simultaneously ever-intensified social connectivity and alienation. In 1994, Wearing visited Naples as it hosted the G7 summit, where she photographed locals in the same fashion with the aid of an interpreter. Thirty years on, Wearing returned to this archive and presents a selection shown for the first time in this exhibition, the hand-written messages now speaking across time and finding new resonance.

Expanding on the themes of her early work, Wearing’s practice has since explored questions around public personas and private selves through a diversity of media, often drawing from disparate cultural history and techniques, including theatre and television. Her ongoing Spiritual Family series, begun in 2008, explores the notion of influence and lineage in the construction of identity in photographic self-portraits of the artist in the guise of artistic forebears that have impacted her practice. For Naples, Wearing has created five new portraits inhabiting the likeness of icons of Italian film: Monica Vitti, Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. These works use masterfully rendered silicon masks, custom wigs, and precise lighting to realise powerfully arresting, uncanny portraits, playing with identity as embodied performance while examining the art historical tradition of self-portraiture as a technique of self-representation, expression and promotion.

Wearing’s work in sculpture is represented by a group of bronze maquettes for her large-scale public monuments of families. Among them is the first sculpture in this body of work, begun in 2007 in Trento, Italy, on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea. In an effort to examine both the continued psychic dominance and the alleged social decline of the nuclear family, submissions were invited via newspaper adverts, from which one ‘typical’ family was selected by a panel comprising a priest, a sociologist, some educators and the exhibition curators, and cast in bronze at a monumental size. Subsequently in the works that followed in the series, A Real Birmingham Family (2015) and A Real Danish Family (2017), Wearing explored expanded notions of the ‘family’, capturing its wide spectrum and the nuances of local context.