LUCY MCKENZIE | MATES

Cabinet Gallery, London

Acquired from the above by David Teiger in December 2004

“Lucy McKenzie studied at a private school for decorative painting in Brussels in 2007– 2008, and the commercial techniques she learned there have been central to her work ever since. Trompe l’oeil is a form of decorative painting, part of the alternative historical narrative of painting that remains independent of Modernism. McKenzie’s work often embraces tension and contradiction by employing essentially conservative artistic methods to express radical ideas... Marble can symbolise authority, and the examples she has chosen [for her exhibition at SVIT Prague] are taken from Prague’s heritage sites, and from buildings constructed in an age when those in power had limitless resources at their disposal. McKenzie makes parallels between marble as a precious material with today’s appetite for the genuine as cultural content. Political and ecological alternatives, subculture and the historic avant-garde are subjects to be mined and polished, instrumentalised through appropriation into works of contemporary art. Trompe l’oeil, by proclaiming its inauthenticity, is highly aware of conceptual exploitation.”

(“Laurent Dupont and Lucy McKenzie at SVIT”, Art Viewer, 4 April 2015)