The Hammer Museum presents Mark Leckey: On Pleasure Bent, on view August 31 – December 8, 2013. Through a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses sculpture, sound, film, and performance, the British artist Mark Leckey explores the potential of the human imagination to appropriate and to animate a concept, an object, or an environment. Drawing on his experiences as a London-based artist who spent his formative years in the north of England, Leckey returns frequently to ideas of personal history, desire, and transformation in his work. Objects and our relationships with them have become focal points for him in his attempt to—as Douglas Adams writes of one of the characters in his novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)—“grip and grapple with every object he touche[s] in order to render it, and thereby himself, substantial.” Leckey places his work somewhere between magic and morbidity.

On Pleasure Bent presents a new body of work in which Leckey attempts to form a kaleidoscopic memoir, constructed from “found memories,” assembling his past from the imagery that he believes conditioned him. Taking its title from an LP by the British comedian Kenneth Williams, the exhibition is an attempt to make sense of Leckey’s own desires and pleasures and their imbrications with technology. On Pleasure Bent is also the title of a film in progress exploring these ideas and issues, and the exhibition features a trailer or teaser for the film, along with Pearl Vision (2012), a video made during his residency at the Hammer. The galleries are each painted one of the primary colors of video—red, green, and blue—reflecting Leckey’s interest in technology and the fundamental colors of picture making and audiovisual technology. In addition to the videos, the exhibition includes LED screens featuring looped animations, “scintillating grids,” liquid crystal displays overlaid with images, and cinema lobby–style “standees.” On Pleasure Bent circles back to the interests that shaped Leckey’s career in its formative years and thus synthesizes a number of concerns that have spanned his entire practice.
Mark Leckey: On Pleasure Bent was organized by Ali Subotnick, curator, with Emily Gonzalez, curatorial assistant.

Mark Leckey was born in Birkenhead, England, in 1964 and lives and works in London. He received his BA from Newcastle Polytechnic. Leckey has exhibited his videos, multimedia installations, sculptures, and collages widely and has had solo shows at the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada (2012); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, England (2010); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2009); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2007); Portikus, Frankfurt (2005); and Migros Museum, Zurich (2003). His work has been included in numerous important international exhibitions, including Il Palazzo Enciclopedico / The Encyclopedic Palace, Venice Biennale (2013); Ghosts in the Machine, New Museum, New York (2012); 10,000 Lives, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2010); Moving Images: Artists & Video/Film, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2010); Playing Homage, Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery; Sympathy for the Devil, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Istanbul Biennial (2005); and Manifesta 5, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, San Sebastián, Spain (2004). Leckey has presented his lecture/performances at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and he participated in Performa 11 (2011) in New York. Leckey recently organized the traveling exhibition The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things for the Hayward Gallery in London, and he will participate in the 2013 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. In 2008 Leckey received the Turner Prize and the Central Art Award, Kölnischer Kunstverein. He is currently reader in fine art at Goldsmiths, London, and from 2005 to 2009 he was professor of film studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His work is in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Het Domein Sittard, the Netherlands; Tate Gallery, London; Trussardi Foundation, Milan; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.