Phil Daniels Cutout

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2008, Mark Leckey’s practice explores the ways in which reality is perpetually destroyed and rebuilt by contemporary media. Executed in 2004, Phil Daniels Cutout relates to Leckey’s video Shades of Destructors created the following year, based on the British 1970s television dramatization of Graham Greene’s 1954 short story The Destructors. Entitled Shades of Greene, the adaptation starred Phil Daniels – who would later go on to play the lead role in the 1979 cult film Quadrophenia – as the ringleader of a gang of boys who destroy a house in their neighbourhood. An icon of British youth culture, Daniels became something of a poster boy for Leckey’s practice. In the present work, his image is multiplied in gradated sizes upon a three-dimensional aluminium support, creating a large-scale cut-out that protrudes into space like a piece of découpage or a cardboard movie-star mannequin. In this respect, the work may also be seen to relate to Leckey’s 2004 exhibition Septic Tank, in which the artist recreated his studio in the style of a film set, populated with characters from the Shades of Greene series. Phil Daniels Cutout was included in the solo show Mark Leckey: Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials at WIELS, Brussels, in 2014: the artist’s largest exhibition to date.