John LeKay
| John LeKay | |
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John LeKay
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| Born | 1 June 1961 London |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Isleworth Polytechnic University |
| Known for | Installation art |
| Notable work | Spiritus Callidus #2 (Crystal Skull) |
John LeKay (born 1 June 1961) is an English conceptual and installation artist and sculptor, who lives in New York City. In 1993, he began to make skulls covered in crystal: he has accused Damien Hirst of copying this and other ideas. He publishes the web site, heyokamagazine.
John LeKay was born in London. He was educated at Isleworth Polytechnic, London in 1977. He moved to New York in 1991. Instead of higher art education, he travelled with a circus and worked at Pinewood Studios.
1983–1986, he created an installation, Non Terrestrial Black Bird of Paradise, consisting of a taxidermied crow, chairs, chicken wire, glasses and photos: this was exhibited at the Bronx Museum.
Inspired by the early work of Francis Bacon and the painting of a slaughtered ox by Rembrandt, he made a “meat series”, 1986–87. An example of this is the 1987 sculpture, This is my Body this is my Blood, consisting of a cut open decapitated lamb carcass, nailed to a piece of plywood. His 1987 sculpture, Wind pipe, was a double bed with a varnished sewer pipe on it.
In 1990, he held his first solo exhibition, at the Paula Allen Gallery, New York. Exhibits included a sensory deprivation tank, and also a large tape recorder, whose microphone was placed inside a sound-proofed acrylic glass box in order to record the sound of silence. Another sculpture subtitled Vanishing Object, was a cross made out of closet freshener, which slowly evaporated in a tall acrylic glass vitrine. Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:
In the early 1990s, LeKay edited an underground magazine entitled Pig, the name referring to a Nostradamus quatrain about men with pig snouts in flying machines and standing for "Politically Incorrect Geniuses". The main contributors were artists, including Rachel Harrison, Dennis Oppenheim, Gretchen Faust, Sean Landers, Rikrit Tiravaneja, Fred Tomaselli and Sue Williams, as well as Young British Artists such as Marcus Harvey, Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst.
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