Isolated Figure (5), 2020
Colour Print on 5mm PVC Foamex, Rotating Motor, Thread
162 x 70 x 5 cm, 64 x 27.56 x 1.97 in.
Edition of 3 + 1AP

Isolated Figures: The joke almost sticks in the throat. The figures spin slowly and relentlessly around themselves on the spot. Something about them isn’t genuine. An intangible unease and mistrust towards their veracity. And yet we will hardly be able to resist laughing a little at them and the situation. At our own fright and at the figures' eel-like sleekness. Because they are both mirrors and projections. They come from the internet, as Wallinger says, from anonymous stock photographic agency figures. Generic, so-called stock images of people made alive and exposed by Wallinger. Spinning in one place, they suggest something of our own loop in which we find ourselves and from which we cannot escape. Who can argue that it is not an ingenious allegory of our collectively but solitarily experienced emotional world during and since the pandemic?

About the artist: Mark Wallinger is one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists. Having previously been nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, he won in 2007 for his installation ‘State Britain’. His work ‘Ecce Homo’ (1999–2000) was the first piece to occupy the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. He represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001. ‘Labyrinth’ (2013), a major and permanent commission for Art on the Underground, was created to celebrate 150 years of the London Underground. In 2018, the permanent work ‘Writ in Water’ was realised for the National Trust to celebrate Magna Carta at Runnymede, and ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ was unveiled in 2019 for the London School of Economics.

A surprising, inventive and profound artist, whose multi-faceted work encompasses painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, film and video, performance and work for the public realm. Stylistic disparity conceals a conceptual coherence, as Wallinger poses big questions about identity, and about the social, cultural and political power structures that guide us, and because of which we are as we are.

Represented by Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich. For further inquiries please write to Fabian Lang at info@fabianlang.ch.