Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union

Lucy McKenzie

SELECTED WORKS BY Lucy McKenzie

Lucy McKenzie
Depeche Mode Night

1999

Acrylic on Found Canvas

160 x 122cm

Lucy McKenzie is young Scottish artist with a growing international following. Developing her own lexicon of passé utopias, McKenzie draws relations between the most unlikely sources: East European propaganda murals, German abstract painting, Cold War iconography, industrialist typeface and 1980's pop music. From money, pop stars, to Olympians, McKenzie paints fleeting moments of idealism: symbols of transient seduction and power.

In Depeche Mode Night, she paints a concert poster over an ‘anonymous’ abstract painting. It’s a haunting reflection of glory days, when culture was a political tool: when painting was Marxist dogma, and songs by a synth-pop band became the anthems for an entire generation caught between anarchy and Thatcherism.

Lucy McKenzie
The Danger in Jazz

2000

Acrylic on Paper

100 x 155.5cm

Painted in the washed out colours of memory The Danger In Jazz initially seems as threatening as a 1950s musical backdrop. But this is no Fred Astaire gig. Rather it’s taken from a video still of Lionel Ritchie’s performance at the 1984 Olympic Games.

The Danger in Jazz is one of a series of paintings depicting the ceremonies of the 1980 Moscow Olympics (boycotted by the Americans), and the 1984 LA Olympics (boycotted by the Eastern Block). Beneath the pop-gloss nostalgia for the 1980's lays a subterfuge often omitted: a Cold War battle for ideological supremacy, where pop music and sporting events were staged propaganda.

Lucy McKenzie
Olga Korbut

1998

Oil on Canvas

107 x 213.5cm

In her portrait of Olga Korbut, McKenzie captures not the gymnast's moment of crowning glory (winning three gold medals at the '72 Olympics) – but rather her crushing parallel bars defeat which won her the hearts of millions. Fragmenting the image to a 'photo-finish', McKenzie conveys a split second of historical immortalization in a freeze frame as imprecise and intangible as the real memory.

Lucy McKenzie
Festival

1999

30 x 41cm

Lucy McKenzie’s paintings explore the power of visual language. Drawing influence from Eastern European murals, graphic design logos, architectural motifs and avant-garde painting, her work mirrors these styles as hollow epitaphs of social and political ideology. In Festival, McKenzie’s tiny canvas flourishes with a detached iciness, its once resonant message buried within a richness of painterly application. McKenzie’s precious tones and fussy brushwork appropriates the form of classic design and infuses it with intimate sentiment. Festival feigns a spiritual luminosity of stained glass.

Lucy McKenzie
Stadium Towers

2000

Acrylic on Canvas

93 x 123cm

In Stadium Towers, Lucy McKenzie appropriates a poster design for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games (an apex of Cold War tension). Painted in worn-out tones, McKenzie alludes to a forgotten political history, as well as the failure of 20th century ideological art. Superimposed over the festive logo, McKenzie includes two militaristic towers, threatening violence and oppression. McKenzie often works from politically charged subject matter; through personal negotiation of propaganda and media material she reconstitutes the power of images, converting "once real" fear into the sublime resonance of aesthetics.

Lucy McKenzie
Untitled

1999

Acrylic on Canvas

210 x 160cm

Lucy McKenzie’s Untitled reduces the 1980 Moscow Olympic poster design to an abstract motif, a requiem to the power of painting. Bright bands of colour frame a central form of a broken octagram: a damaged symbol of completeness and regeneration. Reminiscent of supremacist painting, Untitled sentimentalises a failed Utopian vision. Whitewashing over her canvas, McKenzie sanitises an awkward history, and references the paintings of Kasimir Malevich, an art at odds with Stalinist policy.

Lucy McKenzie
Flood

2000

Oil on Canvas

108 x 87cm

Lucy McKenzie
They’re Lying on Their C.V.’s

2000

Oil on Canvas

119.4 x 180.3 cm

ARTICLES

Lucy McKenzie
Issue 106, April 2007, by Dan Fox, Frieze Magazine

Lucy McKenzie’s touring solo exhibition ‘Ten Years of Robotic Mayhem (including sublet)’ comprises the following. Firstly, the title, taken – I assume – from a video of the same name by West Coast performance group Survival Research Laboratories. Then, a series of framed Hergé-influenced illustrations McKenzie made for the Edinburgh periodical One O’Clock Gun and an Alasdair Gray-esque map she created detailing the locations of outdoor sculpture in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland; a reproduction Charles Rennie MacKintosh chair, and three large paintings after MacKintosh and Belgian Art Nouveau designers Georges Hobé and Paul Hankar. There are also collages of Slovenian band Laibach, the artwork she designed for Erasure’s Union Street album, and the releases on her own record label Decemberism – the compilation Nova Popularna, Bonnie Camplin’s excellent Heavy Epic (cover by Enrico David) and a spoken-word Alasdair Gray LP (distinctive sleeve art by the writer and artist himself). Last but not least, there is the ‘sublet’ – a small booth displaying clothes for sale by designer Becca Lipscombe, and photographs of McKenzie modeling the apparel.
McKenzie’s dexterous draftsmanship and punchy graphic sense has enabled her to develop a distinctive style; a kind of updated Jugendstil figuration spliced with a neo-New Romantic nostalgia, and a fatal attraction to rather self-consciously impeccable cultural reference points. Appropriation is the engine driving her work; less, however, specific images, than a coralling of stylistic licks and moods. Over the past seven years or so, along with the aforementioned examples, she has borrowed from Socialist Realism, Bauhaus, Polish Modernism, Viennese Secessionists, Scottish Muralists, Belgian record label Les Disques du Crepuscule, German record label Brain Records, Brian Eno and Depeche Mode.
Inasmuch as the weight of these lifts is in their socio-cultural significance, McKenzie’s work could be read as a hyper-acceleration of ‘Pictures’-era (the show curated by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space, New York, 1977), or Context Art appropriation strategies. The reality isn’t quite so academically neat. In a recent issue of Untitled magazine, Mick Peter suggested that, in depicting her artist friends, McKenzie seems to long for some kind of internationalist ‘league of the arts’; a life spent sitting in Brussels cafés, chatting about Slovenian Conceptualism or Dutch design whilst listening to hip Scottish bands. With its multi-disclipinary emphases, this exhibition (which originated at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, and moves from Norwich to Arnolfini in Bristol, and finally San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) is indicative of this longing. In a sense, McKenzie’s processes parallel the ways in which subcultures construct their image, forming alliances with like-minds, and excluding those they define themselves against. It’s as if someone were to take Dick Hebdige’s 1979 sociological study Subculture: The Meaning of Style and apply its findings to art; Hebdige’s mapping of Antonio Gramsci’s theories of ‘conjuncture’ onto youth culture – forging identity and ‘social autonomy’ from the detritus of culture available to you.
For all of McKenzie’s savvy, I wonder what it is she is trying to communicate. If appropriation is about a reshuffling of image hierarchies and by extension an investigation of power and control, then McKenzie’s relationship to her references takes on more troubling aspects – it is difficult to escape from the fact that she places herself and her peer group at the centre of her referential nexus. The power of McKenzie’s source material serves to aggrandize her own intellectual pedigree. Whether it’s Laibach or Art Nouveau, each is co-opted into her self-image as a pan-European cultural operator. Is this a question of ‘open source’ art production, dilletantism, or cynical proximity to cultural capital? Perhaps what is more pertinent to consider is what is the intellectual return for the viewer from McKenzie’s matrix of influences?
The most interesting works here were the drawings illustrating One O’Clock Gun’s articles on cultural instrumentalization and gentrification in Scotland. An elegant depiction of grizzled Glaswegian writer James Kelman sat in a bar next to Franz Ferdinand singer Alex Kapranos succinctly conveys the coarse rub of old versus new cultural attitude. Another image depicts the simmering class divisions an issue such as a smoking ban might compound – working class pub habitués and chicly retro punk girls enjoy a thick cloud of cigarette smoke whilst an upwardly mobile middle class family scowl across the room at them. These drawings, like One O’Clock Gun itself, address the complexities of why ‘culture’ should never be regarded as a cure-all panacea for a country’s ills. This localized purpose better serves McKenzie’s romanticized visions of collaboration than her borrowings.

Read the entire article here

Source:frieze.com

Goodbye Ms McKenzie
Issue 562, 27 October 2006, by Alexander Kennedy, The List

With every other artist rushing to Glasgow, Alexander Kennedy looks at the work of Lucy McKenzie who got out quick but cannot forget the city.
It surely wont be long until Scotland sees a major retrospective of Lucy McKenzie’s career so far. The work chosen for her exhibition, Ten Years of Robotic Mayhem (and sublet) acts as an excellent selection of recent work from an oeuvre that continues to develop in wit and confidence. McKenzie’s recent move to Belgium could have something to do with the emphasis this show places on Glasgow as a series of faded and fragmented memories, but the city has always played a pivotal role as subject matter in her paintings and drawings. That said, in the gallery upstairs at the Talbot Rice, her association with Edinburgh comes to the fore, with drawings of ‘well-kent faces’ previously reproduced in The One O’Clock Gun reduced to sinuous inky lines and darkly humorous jutting profiles.
In the main gallery downstairs, McKenzie has mocked up a small Mackintosh-esque room (designs by his contemporaries have also been used). This installation draws together three main themes: the continual fascination with Mackintosh as our only fin de siecle avant-gardist; the artistic relationship (and, sometimes, the lack of one) between Scotland and the rest of Europe; and the culminating sense that when these issues are bridged the relationship created is not too solid.
This is by far the most successful piece in the show, acting both as a protective play den and stage set, but with the corners missing, so that we can be watched from the outside. The deconstructed cuboid structure is placed perfectly yet awkwardly in the lower gallery space, giving the impression that the four enormous canvases that form it have been dragged off the gallery walls or have magically pulled themselves together. Art as an idea, a plan, as a flat-packed room has been expertly realised by letting the work follow its own truth content. Beside this ‘sculpture’ are two Mackintosh ladder-back chairs, pushed right up against the gallery walls. They have now become copies of earlier copies, their placement mimicking how they would be displayed within a museum as ‘originals’, and now, at the opposite extreme, they have become lowly bits of usually invisible gallery furniture for punters to park their arses in.
This theme of displaying that which usually aids the exhibition is continued in the felt screen beside the mocked-up room, which is covered with a screed of ‘hit and miss’ drawings. Some of these are about as successful as 6th form Higher Art sketches, but this is apparently the aesthetic they hope to invoke. The drawings are pined to the board like evidence of a school project on ‘Glasgow’s Architecture’, with pencil, pen and wash drawings, some loose and jagged, others as tight as architectural plans. In one successful watercolour, Mackintosh-like abstract forms grow up and over the walls, dripping down the façade like upside-down tears. Glasgow misses Ms McKenzie as much as she obviously misses us.

Read the entire article here

Source:list.co.uk

Text written by Patricia Ellis

Lucy McKenzie’s paintings explore the authority of visual language. Influence by Eastern European murals, avant-garde painting, Cold War iconography and industrialist typeface, her work mirrors these styles as hollow epitaphs of social and political ideology. Painted in worn-out tones, McKenzie alludes to a wilfully forgotten history, as well as to the failings of 20th century ideological art. McKenzie often works from politically charged subject matter. Through personal negotiation of propaganda and media material she reconstitutes the function of images, converting once real fear into the sublime resonance of aesthetics.

Scouring through photo archives of this past century for the iconic images which dissipate in the collective conscience, the subjects of Lucy McKenzie’s paintings are uncannily familiar. Sporting heroes, Olympics posters, televised events and 80's pop band flyers become generic pop cultural image-blips. They are loaded with a subtext of corruption. It’s a haunting reflection of glory days, when culture was a political tool, when painting was a Marxist dogma and songs by a synth-pop band became anthems for an entire generation caught between anarchy and Thatcherism. Painted in faded, muted tones, McKenzie’s nostalgia for a black-and-white belief system is so much more sinister than history books would imply. She presents the Cold War as a fashion statement, a longing for glamour and subterfuge, and the frivolous possibilities of power that go with it.

Stylistically, McKenzie’s paintings range from hyperrealist to gestural abstraction. They often refer to specific art movements and their geopolitical associations. Through appropriation, McKenzie’s paintings become redundant monuments, pure aesthetic fields stripped of context and meaning. Her canvases offer a subtle beauty; disquieting ruminations of the conflicts and failure of Utopian endeavours, and a guilty sentimentality for our own collective roles as unwitting conspirators.