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