Husband and wife Michael Landy and Gillian Wearing talk about Art Lovers, the first exhibition they have collaborated on in over 20 years
This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“In 2013 I was the artist in residence at the National Gallery in London and I spent the first year going around it nearly every day. It’s an amazing collection, with lots of paintings of heroic deeds, historical and mythological depictions. I was struck by this small painting, A Wall in Naples [c1782] by the Welsh landscape painter Thomas Jones. It felt so ordinary, but in the context of the museum it became extraordinary. The painting is of a wall, with the plaster peeling off and a window with washing hanging outside. I feel the work relates to a lot of mine – it’s about looking twice at something we think we know but we don’t pay much attention to. Like with Jones’s painting, I am interested in what society gives value and worth to.” — Michael Landy
“To be honest, I would have overlooked this painting if Michael hadn’t pointed it out to me. But there is something very modern in its matter-of-factness. There is no rippled light on the wall, no quaintness. It has a sensibility I love in art, like Rembrandt’s last self-portrait, which is also in the National Gallery – it wants to show you a more humbled reality. This is a snapshot of a time that existed once, and I doubt many other artists captured that reality in Naples then. Coming back to the city more recently, Michael and I immersed ourselves again in the history of the place. Naples has an energetic quality to it, a lived-in feel. Even though it has a lot of history, it is not a city that feels like a museum.” — Gillian Wearing
Husband and wife Michael Landy and Gillian Wearing are two of the most provocative and groundbreaking conceptual artists working today. Although both attended Goldsmiths, University of London, where they first met as students in the late 1980s, and rose to prominence in the Nineties as key figures of the revolutionary group of visual artists known as the YBAs – Young British Artists – they have produced bodies of work that are separate and distinct. Landy’s landmark artwork, Break Down (2001), was an extreme performance piece in which the artist destroyed all of his 7,227 possessions over the course of two weeks in a disused store on Oxford Street, in a profound and comedic commentary on consumerism in neoliberal Britain. Wearing’s practice is known for its candour and psychological intensity, recording confessions and interactions of ordinary 82 people befriended through chance encounters. Her breakthrough came with the photographic series Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1992– 93), which captured strangers holding written signs declaring their innermost thoughts.
This spring, Landy and Wearing will present Art Lovers at Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples, the first exhibition they have collaborated on in over 20 years. The show includes work that spans the past three decades of their careers and nods to their personal and artistic relationship, as well as new pieces conceived in response to the Italian port city and its history. These latter works are diverse in subject matter and medium, yet united by the intensity and precision that have marked out the irreverent output of both artists.
Hand-printing: Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine
This story features in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now.
Art Lovers by Michael Landy and Gillian Wearing is on show at Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples until 12 April 2025.
