My Self By Toby Mott

Curated by Stefano Lemon e Guido Gazzilli
With contributions from PrimaLinea Studio and A/POLITICAL

One night in May 1985. Toby Mott, together with his companions, covered the shop windows on Cork Street in grey paint. But it was not they who claimed responsibility for the action: it was the Grey Organisation. A grey suit, a white shirt, no name in the foreground a gesture that rejects both the myth of the artist-hero and the institution that consecrates him.

Forty years on, My Self by Toby Mott turns that grammar on its head. Whereas the Grey Organisation erased the individual within the group’s ‘we’, Mott now exhibits himself, his own journey, his archive, his material traces. Identity is never a given; it is alway constructed: as much through anonymity as through self-revelation.

The exhibition makes this clear right from the threshold: on the opening wall, a previously unseen silkscreen print revisits the historic image of his first solo exhibition in London. Amidst dismantled and rewritten flags, zines and ephemera, an archive comprising tiles, contact sheets and preparatory studies condenses the collective dimension into minute fragments devices of memory that remain active to this day.

Returning to Rome with a body of work that brings together historical pieces and recent works means bringing two eras into play simultaneously: the radical activism of the 1980s and the more intimate perspective of an artist who today chooses to sign his work, collect it and put himself on display. My Self by Toby Mott does not ask us to choose between the Mott of the collective and the Mott of the individual. It asks us to view the same practice from both sides: that of anonymity and that of the signature.

Alessio “Gordo” d’Anelli 

© The Grey Organisation Archive is part of the A/POLITICAL collection.