Mark Leckey and Martin McGeown: The Life and Times of Milton Keynes Gallery

Exhibitions

12 April - 27 June 2010

Using material sourced from Milton Keynes Gallery’s archive, Mark Leckey, winner of the 2008 Turner Prize, and Martin McGeown, Director of Cabinet Gallery, London, have collaborated to make an exhibition marking Milton Keynes Gallery’s tenth anniversary year.

Drawing from the Gallery’s ten year history of exhibitions and projects, and from the very architecture and fabric of the building, Leckey and McGeown have used video footage, installation photography, press material and architectural plans from the Gallery’s archive, so that the Gallery itself becomes an incubator of its own history – a reflexive, sentient, exhibition-making machine, revisiting its past and dreaming about its future.

Leckey has created two new films about the Gallery. The first, Concrete Vache makes use of the Gallery’s extensive documentation, splicing together footage from numerous past exhibitions and events to create a continuous narrative which will be presented alongside a number of 3D models. The second film combines images of the empty Gallery itself, and is shown with imaginary drawings made from descriptions of the site by Viz cartoonist Lee Healey. There will also be a wall-based installation comprising hundreds of thumbnail images from past Milton Keynes Gallery exhibitions.

Milton Keynes Gallery opened in October 1999 as the city’s purpose-built venue for exhibitions of international contemporary art, since when it has organised over eighty exhibitions, including diverse figures such as Gilbert & George (1999), Andy Warhol (2001), Archigram (2003), Phil Collins (2005), Shirana Shahbazi (2006), Pascale Marthine Tayou (2007), Cathy Wilkes (2008) and Nasreen Mohamedi (2009).

British artist Mark Leckey was born in Birkenhead in 1964 and graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic in 1990. He rose to prominence in 1999 with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a survey of Britain’s underground club culture from the 1970s to the early 1990s. He has since exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. The artist lives and works in London and is currently a Film Studies Professor at the Städelschule, Frankfurt-am-Maine, Germany.

Martin McGeown founded Cabinet Gallery with Andrew Wheatley in 1992 and has curated numerous shows, including ‘PopOcultural’, South London Gallery, 1995 and ‘Lovecraft’, CCA, Glasgow, 1997 and most recently an ongoing project entitled ‘120 Day Volume’, A Pallazo Gallery, Brescia, 2009-2010.