Michael Landy

For his degree exhibition at Goldsmith’s in 1988, Michael Landy displayed a series of relief sculptures made of readymade car covers. Drawn to the fluid texture of the fabric and its striking blue colour, Landy transformed the utilitarian off-the-shelf object into enigmatic, abstract yet in some ways strangely anthropomorphic forms. Stretched, cinched and draped, the car covers at once evoke the animated drapery of classical sculpture and the material aesthetic of the Arte Povera tradition. This early body of work initiated an examination of value and consumerism through vernacular culture and everyday objects, themes that Landy would continue to interrogate throughout his practice.

Following his degree show, later in 1988 Landy exhibited the car cover works in the now historic Freeze exhibition staged in London’s Docklands, organised by Damien Hirst alongside a handful of other artist peers. This original grouping of car cover works were eventually destroyed by Landy.

For his exhibition in Naples, Art Lovers, Landy has remade this series of works after a years-long search for the right expressive car cover material. Transported to a new context, the works’ striking azure here evokes the poetic resonance of the colour for Naples and Italy, while the taught tension between the prosaic, mass-manufactured material and the elegant drapery expressed in the work gesture to the complex cultural and industrial histories of the region.