Michael Landy

Michael Landy was born in London in 1963; he lives and works in London. Having studied at Goldsmiths in the late 1980’s, Landy’s work was shown at the now historic Freeze exhibition at London’s docklands in 1988. In many of his earliest works, such as Market (1990), Closing Down Sale (1992) and Scrapheap Services (1995), Landy presented a satirical view on the political and social climate of neoliberal Britain, constructing installations that interrogated issues of consumerism and the commodification of art. Landy’s concern with the attribution of value and ownership have remained central to his practice, notably in Break Down (2001), in which each and every one of the artist’s 7,227 possessions were systematically destroyed by Landy and his assistants over the course of two weeks in a former C&A department store building in Oxford Street, London.