This week I went to the private view of Michael Landy - 20 Years of Pressing Hard a retrospective of his drawings from 1993 -2013 at the Thomas Dane Gallery. The show is in two gallery spaces the first one I went in had a large framed line etching of a weed that he had drawn after his Break Down project in 2001 where he destroyed all his worldly possessions over three weeks in the old C&A building in Oxford Street. The etching is of a weed that he found growing out of the pavement in the estate where he was living and is a celebration to survival against the odds. It is so delicate and beautiful that when I took a picture on my phone it showed nothing of how it really looked. So the only way to really view it is to go and see it.
There are drawings of a machine that Jean Tinguely made in 1960 in the MoMA that caught fire and failed in its performance. Landy became obsessed with this and made several drawings in bleach, correction fluid, oil-stick, charcoal, glue, wax and ink from photographs and film of the event. A row of his 'Portraits' selected from the eighty that he made are here too.
In the other space there is a remake of a black marker pen picture this time using oil-stick, that was just finished in time for the show, I really liked the texture and detail of this and the time span of making it. A lot of his work is about things being destroyed and what comes next. At the area of the gallery where they sell the books I asked a very knowledgeable assistant if there where any collections of the Nourishment weed etchings. She said there had been but that was some time ago and that they had none there, so I will not know if they were as beautiful as the original. I will just have to go back again to have another look.
