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Michael Landy and Gillian Wearing: Art Lovers
4 february - 12 april 2025
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Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples is pleased to present Art Lovers, a collaborative exhibition by Michael Landy and Gillian Wearing. The exhibition will present new work by the artists responding to Naples and its history, alongside a selection of works spanning the last three decades of the artists’ careers, reflecting their ongoing personal and artistic relationship. Art Lovers will be Landy and Wearing’s first exhibition conceived together in over 20 years.
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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.
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Gillian Wearing
Michael, Self Portrait, 2024
signed, dated verso
oil on canvas
diptych20 x 20 cm. each
7 3/4 x 7 3/4 in. -
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Michael LandyPalazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Ruins , 2024watercolour, indelible pen on paper169.7 x 145.9 cm.
66 3/4 x 57 1/2 in. -
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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.
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Michael Landy
Multi-Saint, 2013steel, painted fibre glass, rubber, wood, aluminium, wiring, electrical motors, LED lights, rope458 x 165 x 157 cm.
180 1/4 x 65 x 61 3/4 in. -
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.
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Michael LandySan Gennaro, 2024painted fibreglass, mechanical pump, wood, electrical motor, problood dark100 x 196.6 x 107 cm.
39 1/4 x 77 1/2 x 42 1/4 in. -
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Gillian Wearing
My Hand, 2012
casting wax, paint, nail varnish
11 x 21 x 7 cm.
4 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 2 3/4 in.edition of 30 + 8AP (AP 1/8)
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Michael Landy
Saints Alive 2011-2013, Scaled-Down 2018, 2018
felt pen, pencil, watercolour pencil, ink, paint, photographic paper, card, paper, canvas board, glue
29.1 x 30 x 27 cm.
11 1/2 x 11 3/4 x 10 5/8 in. -
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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 selfexpression, 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.
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Gillian WearingSelf portrait and Michael (sitting room), 2024signed, dated versooil on canvas and board20.2 x 25.2 cm.8 x 10 in.
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Gillian WearingMe as Artemisia Gentileschi, 2023signed label on versoframed c-type print152.4 x 114.3 cm.
60 x 45 in.edition of 6 + 2AP (AP 1/2) -
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Gillian Wearing
Me as Monica Vitti, 2024
framed bromide print
63 x 52.79 cm.
24 1/4 x 20 3/4 in.edition of 6 + 2AP (#1/6)
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Gillian Wearing
Me as Federico Fellini as a clown, 2024
framed c-type print
61.3 x 49.87 cm.
24 1/4 x 19 3/4 in.edition of 6 + 2AP (#1/6)
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Gillian Wearing
Me as Pier Paolo Pasolini, 2024
framed bromide print
61.3 x 46.06 cm.
24 1/4 x 18 1/4 in.edition of 6 + 2AP (#1/6)
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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.
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Themes of representation, performance, embodiment and self-perception recur in three new paintings (all 2024). Wearing embarked on a concentrated period of painting during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when a pause on project commitments, social distancing and seemingly infinite free time opened up an introspective space for revisiting her early love of painting as a young art student. The moment particularly lent itself to self-portraits, and in these new paintings we find reflections and refractions of the self in a variety of expanded forms. At once layered portals as well as opaque surfaces, these precisely composed pictures distil the interconnectedness of perception, identity, and image-making.
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Gillian Wearing
Four comedians (after Edward Hopper), 2024
signed, dated verso
oil on canvas and board
48 x 48 cm.
19 x 19 in. -
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For exhibition and sales enquiries please contact Clare Morris: claremorris@thomasdanegallery.com
For press enquiries please contact: Patrick Shier: patrick@thomasdanegallery.com
