Market Day: John Tweddle ★ Michael Landy
The Mayor Gallery is pleased to present Market Day, pairing Michael Landy's sculpture Costermonger stall no. 3, 1991 with paintings made by John Tweddle in New York between 1966 and 1970 and from the legendary Scull collection. Made a generation apart, the works share the market as a subject and its effects. Landy's stall, a trader's flower barrow, dressed with lights and flowers without its keeper, is a monument to the street trade at the moment of its disappearance. Tweddle's paintings, crowded with dollar signs, trucks and snakes, record his unease at watching his own work become a commodity.
John Tweddle (b. 1938, Pinckneyville, Kentucky - d. 2022, New York) was raised in a trucking family in rural western Kentucky. He moved to New York in 1969, where his first exhibition with the dealer Richard Bellamy caught the attention of Robert Scull, the early champion of Warhol, Johns and Rosenquist, who collected his work in depth. Drawing on comics, cartoons and folk decoration, Tweddle used a deliberately naive visual language to mount a serious examination of capitalism and the commodification of art, a conflict he ultimately resolved by leaving. By 1980 he had withdrawn from the art world entirely, settling eventually in New Mexico and continuing to paint in isolation for the rest of his life.
Michael Landy (b. 1963, London) studied at Goldsmiths and took part in the seminal exhibition Freeze in 1988, alongside the generation that would become known as the YBAs. His major installations of the following decade, Market (1990), Closing Down Sale (1992), Scrapheap Services (1995, Tate) and Break Down (2001), in which he systematically catalogued and destroyed all 7,227 of his possessions, established him as one of the sharpest commentators on consumerism of his generation, made against the backdrop of recession and social change in post-Thatcher Britain. Later projects include Semi-detached (Tate Britain, 2004), Art Bin (South London Gallery, 2010), and Saints Alive (National Gallery, London, 2013).
