The exhibition will current new work by the artists responding to Naples and its historical past, alongside a choice of works spanning the final three a long time of the artists’ careers, reflecting their ongoing private and inventive relationship. Artwork Lovers will likely be Landy and Sporting’s first exhibition conceived collectively in over 20 years.
Landy and Sporting each got here to prominence within the Nineties after learning at Goldsmiths in London, the place they first met, within the late Eighties. Landy’s early work from this era political and social local weather of neoliberal Britain, producing works and installations in varied media that introduced a satirical view on the interrogated problems with labour, consumerism and worth. These issues led to the landmark work Break Down (2001), during which Landy and a gaggle of assistants systematically destroyed every one of many artist’s 7,227 possessions over the course of two weeks, in an audacious performative act staged in a former C&A division retailer constructing on Oxford Road, London. Within the aftermath of Break Down, a tabula rasa in a artistic and private sense, the primary works Landy produced had been delicate etchings of frequent weeds discovered round London—an apposite subject material symbolic of survival and renewal – which grew to become the Nourishment sequence (2002–ongoing). For this exhibition Landy presents a gaggle of recent etchings of weeds encountered within the derelict nooks and on the roadsides of Naples, made throughout a number of visits to the town in 2024. The meticulously intricate renderings honour the missed and have fun resilience, in a poetic ode to the town itself.
In dialog with the etchings are works on paper from Landy’s latest Future Ruins sequence, depicting present landmarks—together with the grand Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome—in imaginary states of decay. Referencing the lengthy Western custom of artists captivated by ruins each actual and imagined, together with the eighteenth-century cultural craze for rediscovering and even recreating ‘ornamental’ ruins in England and France, Landy’s future ruins plumb the political and emotional registers of the motif, with its embedded notions of worth, historical past, loss and nostalgia.
In 2010 Landy was chosen for a residency on the Nationwide Gallery in London, the place he served as Affiliate Artist till 2012. He spent the primary yr of the residency wanting on the gallery’s assortment of over 2,300 works almost daily. After an intense interval of drawing, Landy started to make collages utilizing a whole bunch of printouts of the work of outdated masters which he lower up, rearranged and caught again collectively. These collages in flip led to the creation of formidable large-scale, interactive kinetic sculptures designed to be activated by guests, within the spirit of the playfulness of Jean Tinguely’s madcap, animated sculptural machines. This exhibition revisits Multi-Saint (2013), considered one of six sculptures from the residency, which references work by Carlo Crivelli, Ambrogio Bergognone, and Hans Memling, incorporating the attributes of Saint Michael, Saint Lawrence, Saint Catherine, Saint Peter and Saint Lucy. For Artwork Lovers Landy has made a brand new kinetic sculpture modelled after the patron saint of Naples, San Gennaro, as depicted in an eighteenth-century portray by Italian painter Girolamo Pesce. Bigger than life in multiple sense, Landy’s San Gennaro (2024) centres on the aura and spectacle of the martyr’s famed relic—his blood—held on the Naples Cathedral in a glass vial.
Sporting graduated from Goldsmiths in 1990 and held her first solo exhibition in 1993 at Metropolis Racing in South London. The exhibition introduced work from her ground-breaking sequence Indicators that say what you need them to say and never Indicators that say what another person desires you to say (1992–93), for which sheapproached individuals on the streets in London and requested them to jot down a private phrase on a chunk of paper, after which photographed them displaying their ideas. Drawing the topics right into a relationship with the artist and art work as each participant and collaborator, these portraits plumbed the connection between self-expression, the confessional, personal life and social belonging, themes that achieve recent poignancy in at present’s world of concurrently ever-intensified social connectivity and alienation. In 1994, Sporting visited Naples because it hosted the G7 summit, the place she photographed locals in the identical style with the help of an interpreter. Thirty years on, Sporting returned to this archive and presents a variety proven for the primary time on this exhibition, the hand-written messages now talking throughout time and discovering new resonance.
Increasing on the themes of her early work, Sporting’s observe has since explored questions round public personas and personal selves by a variety of media, usually drawing from disparate cultural historical past and methods, together with theatre and tv. Her ongoing Religious Household sequence, begun in 2008, explores the notion of affect and lineage within the building of identification in photographic self-portraits of the artist within the guise of inventive forebears which have impacted her observe. For Naples, Sporting has created 5 new portraits inhabiting the likeness of icons of Italian movie: Monica Vitti, Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. These works use masterfully rendered silicon masks, customized wigs, and exact lighting to comprehend powerfully arresting, uncanny portraits, enjoying with identification as embodied efficiency whereas analyzing the artwork historic custom of self-portraiture as a method of self-representation, expression and promotion.
Sporting’s work in sculpture is represented by a gaggle of bronze maquettes for her large-scale public monuments of households. Amongst them is the primary sculpture on this physique of labor, begun in 2007 in Trento, Italy, on the event of the artist’s exhibition on the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea. In an effort to look at each the continued psychic dominance and the alleged social decline of the nuclear household, submissions had been invited by way of newspaper adverts, from which one ‘typical’ household was chosen by a panel comprising a priest, a sociologist, some educators and the exhibition curators, and solid in bronze at a monumental dimension. Subsequently within the works that adopted within the sequence, A Actual Birmingham Household (2015) and A Actual Danish Household (2017), Sporting explored expanded notions of the ‘household’, capturing its huge spectrum and the nuances of native context.
Themes of illustration, efficiency, embodiment and self-perception recur in three new work (all 2024). Sporting launched into a concentrated interval of portray through the COVID-19 lockdowns, when a pause on venture commitments, social distancing and seemingly infinite free time opened up an introspective area for revisiting her early love of portray as a younger artwork scholar. The second significantly lent itself to self-portraits, and in these new work we discover reflections and refractions of the self in a wide range of expanded types. Directly layered portals in addition to opaque surfaces, these exactly composed photos distil the interconnectedness of notion, identification, and image-making.
at Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples
till April 12, 2025
