Michael Landy

Michael Landy (b. 1963) belongs to the group of »Young British Artists,« who, beginning in 1988, caused an international sensation. He created installations, in which real life and fiction entered into an unsettling liaison. Landy’s art is characterized by an intensive analysis of society, of its attitude towards consumption, towards the world of commodities, the transience of things, and the way society deals with ownership and letting go of this. With his works, he raises essential (unspoken) questions: How does the ownership of material objects affect us? What do we need to live? But also: How creative is destruction? Time and again, the artist succeeds in coming up with plausible and surprising artistic formulations of these themes. With Break Down (2001), he became well known among a wider public: In a retail shop in London, he inventoried all objects he possessed at the time, only to destroy these within the frameworks of a regulated process. Landy concentrates on the function of art and artworks within society. The Museum Tinguely is presenting the artist’s first retrospective exhibition. The accompanying catalog brings together works from 1990 to today and thus sheds light on his entire oeuvre to date. The elaborately designed catalog is bound as a stiff soft cover with a four-sided closed block, which the reader has to »destroy« to open the book.