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1/12/2005

Mark Leckey

Portikus im Leinwandhaus, Frankfurt

Gorgeousness and Gorgeosity

In recent years, British video and sound artist Mark Leckey (born 1964) has become widely known for his atmospheric projection pieces and his audio sculptures. In his films and installations Leckey blends the worlds of popular culture and visual art into a uniquely riveting mix of sound and vision. As a member of the band donAteller and, more recently, of Jack too jack, the artist has also played an active role in London’s music world. His 1999 video essay Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which has been described as the most important video work of the 1990s, is a compilation of found footage from British dance floors of the 70s and 80s. A documentary of sorts, Leckey's video chronicles what British critic Matthew Higgs describes the “rites of passage" experienced by successive generations of British (sub)urban youth. Typical of this work, and of Leckey’s production in general, is a celebratory tone that doesn’t exclude a melancholy sense of loss. Comparing Leckey to the Baudelairean flaneur, Higgs states:

“Leckey's unhurried but measured production shares something of the sublime idleness so beloved by Balzac and Debord. Unlike most art that seeks to implicate itself in popular culture, Leckey's recent projects eschew ironic posturing in favour of a more reverential, loving tone. His art possesses a strange non-art-like quality, operating, as it does, on the knife's edge where art and life meet. Mark Leckey may indeed be the closest thing we have to Constantin Guys, Baudelaire's famed ‘painter of modern life.’"

At the Portikus, the artist presents two works involving moving imagery inside a special architectural environment: Made in ‘Eaven, 2004 (16 mm, 3 min. loop), a film displaying a legendary sculptural work by Jeff Koons, and Drunken Bakers, 2005 (DVD, 55 min.), a piece about mental and physical deterioration of the two central characters of the work. For the latter work, which uses the imagery from a popular comic, the artist has produced a new soundtrack using his own voice as well as that of colleague Steve Claydon. Since 2005, Mark Leckey is professor of film at Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main.

Represented by the galleries Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York and Cabinet, London, he has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US, and his work can be found in several of the world’s most important museum collections, including London’s Tate Modern. Gorgeousness & Gorgeosity is the artists’ first institutional solo show in Germany.

The exhibition has been supported by Deutsche Bank Stiftung.

Opening: December 2, h 8 pm

Portikus im Leinwandhaus
Weckmarkt 17 - Frankfurt/Main

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