Mark Leckey
Gorgeousness & Gorgeosity
03 December 2005 - 22 January 2006
Portikus im Leinwandhaus
Weckmarkt 17 D-60311 Frankfurt am Main
Telefon: 49-69-2199 87-59/-60
Fax: 49-69-2199 87-61
info [at] portikus.de
Opening on Friday, Dec 2, 2005, 8pm
Leckey’s unhurried but measured production shares something of the sublime idleness so beloved by Balzac and Debord. Unlike most art that seeks to implicate itself in popular culture, Leckey’s recent projects eschew ironic posturing in favour of a more reverential, loving tone. His art possesses a strange non-art-like quality, operating, as it does, on the knife’s edge where art and life meet. Mark Leckey may indeed be the closest thing we have to Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s famed painter of modern life.”
At the Portikus, the artist presents two works involving moving imagery inside a special architectural environment: Made in Eaven, 2004 (16 mm, 3 min. loop), a film displaying a legendary sculptural work by Jeff Koons, and Drunken Bakers, 2005 (DVD, 55 min.), a piece about mental and physical deterioration of the two central characters of the work. For the latter work, which uses the imagery from a popular comic, the artist has produced a new soundtrack using his own voice as well as that of colleague Steve Claydon. Since 2005, Mark Leckey is professor of film at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.Represented by the galleries Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Gavin Browns enterprise, New York and Cabinet, London, he has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US, and his work can be found in several of the worlds most important museum collections, including Londons Tate Modern.
After moving from its original address in the summer of 2003, the Portikus has produced more than twenty exhibitions in a flexible structure designed by artists Tobias Rehberger and Olafur Eliasson. Leckeys show is the last show at this venue. In the spring of 2006 the Portikus moves to a new building on a small island in the river Main.
The exhibition has been supported by Deutsche Bank Stiftung
