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6/10/2004

Richard Wilson

Program, London

Short Back and Sides

“The strength of Wilson’s art lies in its complex play of the real, the artificial, the illusory and the spectacular.”
Michael Archer, Richard Wilson, published by Merrell, 2001

Program is pleased to present a new work by the renowned British sculptor Richard Wilson.

An artist of international acclaim, Wilson is best known for his intriguing and often disorientating sculpture and installations that range from the monumental to the minutely observed. The subversion of form and function is a continuous vein running through Wilson’s work. The artist locates his explorations within the tangible, familiar spaces of architecture, furniture and machinery, but often challenges the viewer’s preconceptions of how these spaces and objects can or should behave.

For Program, Wilson returns to his interest in the manipulation of prefabricated volumes such as building site cabins or, in this case, utilitarian filing cabinets. In Short Back and Sides, tensions between deliberate articulation and more violent processes provide the prosaic material with unexpected energy.

“Wilson’s work is not a re-imagining of how things could be but instead a particularly tangible and intense renegotiation of the received order of the built environment in the here and now. It is a questioning of possibility, but one Wilson bases in the contingency of the materials that surround us and in a very concrete form of conjecture: I don’t have a vocabulary of shapes and forms that I create to - I have to go to a real thing. So I will take a filing cabinet, a billiard table, a swimming pool, a façade or a building and I will manipulate it in some way - transform it so it no longer functions in the way you expect it to. But I need that initial thing from the real world because I’ve always been concerned with the way you can alter someone’s perception, knock their view of the world off-kilter. And to do that I need to start with something we think we understand.”
from Simon Morrissey, Richard Wilson, Tate Publishing, Spring 2005

Richard Wilson has exhibited widely internationally and has work in numerous major private and public collections. A number of his major works are on permanent display, including two in London. 20:50 (1987), a dark expanse of sump oil that perfectly mirrors its architectural surroundings to destabilizing effect, is installed at the Saatchi Gallery. Slice of Reality (2000), the brutally reduced remnant of a redundant 700-ton dredging ship is sited in the River Thames at Blackwall Point, next to the Millennium Dome on the Greenwich Peninsula.

Wilson is a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award (2002-05) and is the subject of a monograph in the Tate Modern Artists Series, published in Spring 2005 by Tate Publishing. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions and commissions include Bank Job, Palazzo delle Papesse Contemporary Art Centre, Sienna (2004); Galleria Fumagalli, Bergamo, Italy (2004); and CUBE, Manchester (2005).

For further information and images please contact Sotiris Kyriacou at the gallery on 020 7439 1123.

Program
1st Floor 2 New Burlington Place
London W1S 2HP

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