Art

A room of one’s own

Not content with just a show at MoMA, Lucy McKenzie is redesigning the gallery space itself.

By Sophie Fels

Untitled from "Los Alamos"

For most people, making art means taking risks. But for 31-year-old Scottish painter Lucy McKenzie, art is a blue-chip, career-track slog: the Tate, the Modern, Venice, Berlin, yawn. So last year she started an interior-decorating business—and when MoMA wanted to debut her work as part of its ongoing “Projects” series, she arranged to redesign the gallery the pieces are going into. We reached her at home in London.

What are you bringing to New York?
I’ve made an all-encompassing interior mural on canvas, a very dark, paneled library. And then we have heavy drapes to hang framed work on, and tape to stencil a rug onto the museum floor. I have a small company with two friends, Beca Lipscombe and Bernie Reid—we’re called Atelier, and the installation is by us as a design team.

Does being in more than one field make you feel more secure financially?
It’s a different economic paradigm, getting paid as an artisan. You don’t have all the value-added rhetoric about artwork. Beca and Bernie come from completely different fields, and I feel slightly guilty about introducing them to the contemporary-art world. It’s so bizarre to them.

Your résumés look different?
Oh, totally. And it’s always interesting to see how people treat them, because if someone, if an institution treats them badly—if people don’t respect them because they’re not “the artist,” you know, it’s not very good in my eyes. [Laughs] I respect all the fields of art and design, and especially well-made objects that aren’t necessarily contemporary art. I just studied for six months in a specialist school to learn patinas, gilding, wood graining and marbling, and all these traditional techniques that I use in the installation. I learned so much more about painting there than I ever did at art school.

Compared with those skills, is there something scary about a market where a signature raises the price of anything?
It’s not that I think it’s scary. I think it’s unchallenging.

Because you’ve already done that?
Because making something that will be in a place permanently, for people to live or dance or be with, tests your work so much more extremely. I’m not against white boxes at all, but what you see in a white box like a museum or gallery often ends up on somebody’s living-room wall, and it’s often much more interesting and sympathetic there.

“Projects 88: Lucy McKenzie” is at MoMA Sept 10–Dec 1.

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