LONDON.- The Mayor Gallery will present Market Day, pairing Michael Landy's sculpture Costermonger stall no. 3 (1991) with paintings made by John Tweddle (1938–2022) in New York between 1966 and 1972 and from the legendary Scull collection. Made a generation apart, the works share the market as a subject and its effects. Landy's stall, a trader's flower barrow, dressed with lights and flowers without its keeper, is a monument to the street trade at the moment of its disappearance. Tweddle's paintings, crowded with dollar signs, trucks and snakes, record his unease at watching his own work become a commodity. Both artists eventually acted on the suspicion their work describes: Landy went on to destroy all his possessions in Break Down (2001), and Tweddle left New York around 1980, withdrawing from the art world for good.
Costermonger stall no. 3 follows Landy's installation Market (1990), one hundred empty market stalls, his homage to real goods passing between real people, and anticipates his subsequent works Closing Down Sale (1992) and Scrapheap Services (1995). The barrow brings the craft of street display, then vanishing from London, directly into the gallery. It is joined by seven Tweddle paintings from the years of his brief embrace by the New York art world, from Untitled (Self-Portrait with Fish) (1966) to Kiss (1970), including the pointedly titled Art and $$$. Their dense decorative borders, close to patchwork quilting, turn the folk ornament of Tweddle's rural Kentucky upbringing into economic commentary, the dollar sign less a celebration than a warding-off.
John Tweddle (b. 1938, Pinckneyville, Kentucky - d. 2022, New York) was raised in a trucking family in rural western Kentucky, and the imagery of that life remained his subject throughout his career. He moved to New York in 1969, where his first exhibition with the dealer Richard Bellamy caught the attention of Robert Scull, the early champion of Warhol, Johns and Rosenquist, who collected his work in depth. Drawing on comics, cartoons and folk decoration, Tweddle used a deliberately naive visual language to mount a serious examination of capitalism and the commodification of art, a conflict he ultimately resolved by leaving. By 1980 he had withdrawn from the art world entirely, settling eventually in New Mexico and continuing to paint in isolation for the rest of his life. He exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work is held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Michael Landy (b. 1963, London) studied at Goldsmiths and took part in the seminal exhibition Freeze in 1988, alongside the generation that would become known as the YBAs. His major installations of the following decade, Market (1990), Closing Down Sale (1992), Scrapheap Services (1995, Tate) and Break Down (2001), in which he systematically catalogued and destroyed all 7,227 of his possessions, established him as one of the sharpest commentators on consumerism of his generation, made against the backdrop of recession and social change in post-Thatcher Britain. Later projects include Semi-detached (Tate Britain, 2004), Art Bin (South London Gallery, 2010), and Saints Alive (National Gallery, London, 2013). His work is held in public collections including Tate, the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
