[citation needed] In 1992, Landy started an association with Karsten Schubert by making Closing Down Sale for his gallery, an installation made up of a number of objects in shopping trolleys labelled "BARGAIN" and recorded announcements encouraging visitors to buy.

Before Break Down, Landy's best-known work was Scrapheap Services (1995–1996), which featured a fictitious cleaning company which sought to change society by way of "a minority of people being discarded".

Its visual impact on one level is a typical industrial event, yet the gallery environment and bright red figures, along with the sinister irony of the title, is intended to force the viewer to address issues of humanity and consumerism.

In 1997, work which Landy had previously sold to Charles Saatchi was included in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.

Break Down, the work which put him in the public eye, was held in February 2001 at an old branch of the clothes store C&A on Oxford Street in London (C&A had recently ceased trading, and the shop had been emptied).

Landy gathered together all his possessions, ranging from postage stamps to his car, and including all his clothes and works of art by himself and others, painstakingly catalogued all 7,227 of them in detail, and then destroyed all in public.

The process of destruction was done on something resembling an assembly line in a mass production factory, with ten workers reducing each item to its basic materials and then shredding them.