John LeKay – Butterfly Valve – Ball Valve manufacturer
Life and work
John LeKay was born in London. He was educated privately and at Isleworth Polytechnic University, 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.
19831986, 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.
This Is My Body, This Is My Blood by John Lekay, 1987, lamb on wood
Inspired by the early work of Francis Bacon and the painting of a slaughtered ox by Rembrandt, he made a eat series, 198687. 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.
Wind Pipe by John LeKay, 1987, varnished sewer pipe in bed
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 The New York Times:
As a sculptor, John Lekay is interested in changing states, viewer participation and a strange, not always comfortable intimacy … Anyone who thinks all this sounds a bit sophomoric would not be entirely wrong. Nonetheless, these works generate an atmosphere of quietude and heightened awareness, a sense of time passing and things changing, that can engross and