Michael Landy announces first Sussex exhibition

Michael Landy, for whom drawing has always been a crucial part of his work, is widely acknowledged as one of the most talented draughtsmen of his generation. Known more for his large installations and participatory works, such as Semi-detached (2004) the reconstruction of his Essex childhood home at Tate Britain, or his kinetic Saints Alive sculptures (2013) shown at the National Gallery, in this exhibition he reveals a quieter and more intimate consideration of the world around him.  

In LOOK, Landy presents a group of intensely personal drawings from 2004-2005 relating to his own experience of testicular cancer and his father’s tunnelling accident. The fragmented minutiae of life, and the human body, float in isolation on the white page, disconnected yet lovingly rendered with a delicacy and poignancy that the object or subject would not normally command. Through his intense observation and focus, Landy has created a body of work that represents the bond between father and son, reflecting on memory, vulnerability and the past.  

These works will be accompanied by a new self-portrait made specifically for Hastings Contemporary.

The exhibition will also include Landy’s second series of Nourishment etchings from 2024 that sit, maybe ironically, within the Botanical Drawing tradition. Elevating the humble weed to a majestic scale with precision and elegance, the 2024 Nourishments emerged from a residency in Naples. Landy collected a number of these plants and took them back to his residence in Naples, where he potted and tended them, making studies of their structures including detailed renderings of roots, leaves and flowers.

Here we see Landy once again revelling in and scrutinising the resilience and complex structures of these disregarded elements that surround us in our urban environments. Of these plants Landy said ‘they are marvellous, optimistic things that you find ... they occupy an urban landscape which is very hostile and they have to be adaptable and find little bits of soil to prosper.’

This exhibition considers Landy’s continued engagement with marginalisation, our ideas of value, and his interest in the overlooked or disregarded. Finding beauty in the ordinary, giving new meaning and dignity to that which is passed over by most, he elevates the everyday while bringing our attention to simple complexity.

Landy said: "As a child, if you put anything in front of me, I would try to render it to the best of my ability. Not much has changed in the proceeding 50 years."

Hastings Contemporary Director Kathleen Soriano says, ‘Landy’s power of observation and maverick view of the world that surrounds us, reminds us to pause and consider the detail. In fragmenting the elements he draws attention to emotion, to tenderness, to truth and beauty.’

Michael Landy was born in 1963 in London, where he still lives and works. After studying at the Loughborough College of Art and Goldsmiths College, he participated in the seminal 1988 exhibition Freeze. His first major project, Market (1990), consisted of a large-scale assembly of generic market stalls, artificial turf and plastic bread crates, installed in the vast disused Building One in South London. His 1996 Scrapheap Services, now in the Tate collection, is a room-size installation of a fictional 'people-cleansing' company.  

His most widely known work, Break Down (2001), took place in an empty department store on Oxford Street in London where, after creating an exact inventory of all his possessions, he set about systematically destroying them over a two-week period. In a similar fashion, for Art Bin (South London Gallery, 2010, subsequently presented at the 2014 Yokohama Triennale), Landy constructed an enormous perspex cube into which artists were invited to dispose of works they felt to be creative failures.

Another feature of Landy’s practice involves temporal public commissions and archival projects. In 2004, Landy exhibited Semi-detached at the Tate Britain Duveen Galleries, a full-scale model of his father’s home incorporating video and sound. Landy's public commissions include Acts of Kindness for the London Underground (2011–2011), and his first permanent public commission Lemon Meringue (2024) at East Bank, Stratford Waterfront in London. A new permanent public sculpture, a Humanitarian Aid Memorial, will be unveiled in Gunnersbury Park in London in 2025.

In 2021, Landy presented Welcome to Essex, a major monographic exhibition at Firstsite, Colchester, featuring new commissions exploring the recent history of Essex. Elected as a Royal Academician in 2008 and received a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2021, his works are held in public institutions internationally, including the Tate Collection; the Arts Council, England; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.  

Michael Landy brings LOOK to Hastings Contemporary on Sat 27 September 2025 – Sun 15 March 2026.

www.hastingscontemporary.org      

Main image by Todd White Art Photography