Interview with Mark Wallinger

18/03/16
Interview: Mark Wallinger

Mark Wallinger: ID
Hauser & Wirth
26 February - 7 May 2016

The walls of Hauser & Wirth’s North Gallery are hung with huge canvases, dominated by looming black shapes, smeared on, with vast hand gestures, mirroring themselves and each other, demanding interpretation in the same way as a Rorschach test. The paintings – Vitruvian in measure, at twice a man’s height tall and an arm-span wide – are from a series of id Paintings by the Turner Prize-winning artist, Mark Wallinger (b1959). They form part of his new exhibition, ID, his debut solo show at the gallery, focusing on Freud’s interrogation of the psyche, the self and the subject. Easy to miss, beside these towering inky smears, is a much smaller work, Ego (2016), comprising two iPhone photographs of Wallinger’s hands, posing as a playful recreation of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.

Next door, in the South Gallery, Wallinger has installed a life-size, mirrored, revolving replica of the New Scotland Yard sign, here signifying the superego, with its all-seeing, controlling eye – a nod to some of his more political works of the past. The back rooms house the smaller video pieces: Orrery (2016), Shadow Walker (2011) and Ever Since (2012), each one taking the viewer on a journey, much as they did Wallinger during the creative process.

After giving a guided tour of the exhibition, Wallinger spoke to Studio International about his own journey and the – sometimes subconscious – messages and significations implied.

Read this interview here

Review of Louise Bourgeois: A Woman Without Secrets at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art

15/08/14

Louise Bourgeois: A Woman Without Secrets

ARTIST ROOMS On Tour

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough

18 July – 12 October 2014

“When does the emotional become physical? When does the physical become emotional? It’s a circle going round and round.” Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) posed these questions in 1991, speaking about her series of sculptural works, Cells. “Fear is pain,” she went on, before admitting that emotions are the primary subject of her work – emotions, contradictions and the childhood trauma of living with the knowledge of her father’s affair with her English governess.

The feisty and widely read artist, born in Paris, but an American citizen from 1955, died not long before reaching her centenary. She left behind a great body of work examining the interplay between such opposites as male and female, father and mother, soft and hard, exterior and interior, vulnerability and strength. Her recurring motifs at first appear simple, but, as her assistant and friend for more than 30 years, Jerry Gorovoy, says: “The more time you spend with her work, the more complex it is.” Rather like a spider’s web, one might suggest.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/louise-bourgeois-woman-without-secrets-review-sculpture-maman

Video review of Daniel Silver: Dig at the Odeon Site, 24 Grafton Way

16/10/13

Daniel Silver: Dig

The Odeon Site, 24 Grafton Way

12 September – 3 November 2013

It might appear that we are miles away from civilisation – at least, from what we know this to be, in terms of the every day hustle and bustle of London – but, in fact, not only are we surrounded by what could well be remnants and remains, artefacts and evidence, of myriad other civilisations, both modern and ancient, but, we are, in fact, almost as centrally placed in the English capital as it is possible to be.

In fact, we are standing in the one time multi-storey car park on the long derelict site of one of London’s largest Odeon cinemas, on Grafton Way, just off Tottenham Court Road. This dark, dank, deserted basement is currently host to the latest Artangel commission, Dig, by sculptor Daniel Silver.

Fragments, oddments, body parts and tools are strewn all around, assembled on wooden benches, like in an archaeological workshop. Taller figures and busts, some on plinths, rise out of the mud and clay. 

To read the rest of this review and to view the video, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/daniel-silver