Mark Leckey

Mark Leckey (born 1964) is a British contemporary artist.

His found object art and video pieces, which incorporate themes of nostalgia and anxiety, and draw on elements of pop culture, span several works and exhibitions.

Leckey was born in Birkenhead, Wirral, near Liverpool, England, in 1964.

The work is a compilation of found footage from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s underground music and dance scene in the UK.

It starts with the disco scene of the 1970s, touches upon the Northern soul of the late 1970s and early 1980s and climaxes with the rave scene of the 1990s.

Mash-ups of a single soundtrack play during the whole video, giving a sense of unity and narrative to the video.

However, there are moments of spoken text.

At one point an animated element - a bird tattoo image - appears as if released from the hand of a dancer, then carried into the next shot finds its place on the arm of another of the film's nightclubbing subjects.

Following a conversation with his stepfather he took his A Levels and went to an art college in Newcastle from 1987 to 1990, but didn't enjoy it.

He exhibited alongside Damien Hirst in the 1990 New Contemporaries exhibition at the ICA but afterwards dropped from view, before making a "comeback" with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore in 1999.

Leckey moved to New York in late 1995 and first returned to London in 1997, where he worked for web design agency Online Magic.

In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Industrial Light and Magic (2008), for which he won the 2008 Turner Prize.

When he made the video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore in 1999, he was living in a tiny flat in Windmill Street, in Fitzrovia.

He formed the band donAteller with Ed Laliq, and had the first gig at the 414 Club in Brixton.

Later band members include Enrico David and Bonnie Camplin.

One evening in 1999, Gavin Brown, Martin McGeown and Leckey were at a gallery private view in London.

Emma Dexter, then a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), talked to Leckey, who argued that the most exciting art form of the time was music video.

Intrigued, Dexter invited him to make a work.

Leckey produced a 15-minute film that he called Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.

The work was first screened at the ICA.

In 2004, he participated in Manifesta 5, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art.

He served as professor of film studies at the Städelschule, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany from 2005 to 2009.

He lives in north London with his wife, Lizzie Carey-Thomas, a curator of contemporary art at the Serpentine Gallery, and their daughter.

Leckey's video work has as its subject the "tawdry but somehow romantic elegance of certain aspects of British culture," He likes the idea of letting "culture use you as an instrument."

but adds that the pretentiousness that artists sometimes fall into is destructive to the artistic process: "What gets in the way is being too clever, or worrying about how something is going to function, or where it's going to be. When you start thinking of something as art, you're fucked: you're never going to advance."

Matthew Higgs has described his work as “possess[ing] a strange nonartlike quality, operating, as it does, on the knife's edge where art and life meet." Leckey cited Erik Davis, the Californian cultural critic as a big influence. He classified himself as a pop artist.

In 2006 he participated in the Tate Triennial.

His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, in 2008 and at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2007.

In a 2008 interview in The Guardian, he described how he grew up in a workin-class family and became a "casual" in his youth.

His parents both worked for Littlewoods, the clothes store and betting company based in Liverpool.

School, at a comprehensive in Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, was not a happy experience for Leckey.

He left school at 15 with one O Level, in art, and at 19 became obsessed with learning about ancient civilizations.

He has described himself as an autodidact, "That's why I use bigger words than I should. It's a classic sign."

His performances have been presented in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art, Abrons Arts Center; at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, both in 2009; and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, in 2008.

His works are held in the collections of the Tate and the Centre Pompidou.

In 2013, Leckey toured the UK for his curatorial project, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, commissioned by the Hayward Gallery.

In the autumn of 2014, the Wiels contemporary art centre in Brussels staged a mid-career retrospective devoted to Leckey.

The exhibition, named Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials, is Leckey’s largest exhibition to date.

The title comes from a letter by Guillaume Apollinaire, in which he claims that what he and filmmaker Georges Méliès do is "lend enchantment to vulgar materials".

In 2019 Lecky exhibited O' Magic Power of Bleakness at Tate Britain, London.