Richard Wilson

by SimonMorrissey (Author), Michael Archer (Author), HarryStocks (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.28

  Richard Wilson is one of the foremost exponents of installation art working in the world today. His seminal work 20:50, a sea of reflective sump oil permanently installed in the Saatchi Collection, London, has been described as one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century. More recent pieces that have generated universal critical acclaim include Slice of Reality, a 70-foot high vertical cross-section of a 600-ton dredger located in the Thames next to the Millennium Dome in London, and Set North for Japan, a full-scale steel framework replica of the artist's own house, displaced and inverted in the Japanese countryside. This, the first monograph on the artist, examines the full spectrum of his work, moving from models, drawings, and his many gallery-based projects to collaborations with architects and engineers to realize such major architectural interventions as Over Easy, a 25-foot, imperceptibly rotating, disc-shaped section of a building's facade that challenges our collective expectation and experience of how space and materials should behave. Richard Wilson includes more than fifty pieces made over the past twenty years, as well as a comprehensive checklist that also includes earlier projects from the 1970s, offering a long overdue survey of the work of one of the most important artists of modern times.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.28

  Richard Wilson was born in London in 1953. Descended on one side from a line of builders and on the other of artists, his work often comes closer to engineering or even architecture than it does to traditional sculpture. Typically he transforms the viewer's environment into something unsettling and strange by the interventions he makes, whether in the internal space of a gallery, the structure of a building or in one of the ships with which he has a particular affinity. Perhaps his best-known work is 20:50, currently on show at, and probably the most popular exhibit in, the Saatchi Gallery in London. For 20:50, Wilson flooded a gallery space with oil, which has a highly reflective surface. Into the oil is built a kind of narrow pier or promenade down which one person at a time can walk, the oil perilously close to their body. So reflective is the oil that the room induces a strong sense of disorientation. Further along the River Thames, next to the Millennium Dome, is another Wilson piece that provides an unexpected sight. The skeletal ship A Slice of Reality, its sides removed and with the tides moving freely through it, is both a startling sculptural object in its own right and a comment on the vanished shipping industry that was once a mainstay of the river community. In Los Angeles, Wilson was inspired by one of the most ubiquitous symbols of Californian life, the swimming pool, suspending a fibreglass pool shell from a sixty foot-long pipe in MOCA's subterranean gallery (Deep End). In addition to and often in conjunction with these large-scale projects, Wilson makes films and sculpture, takes photographs and stages performance events and has been a formative influence on a generation of British artists. This lavishly illustrated career survey includes a new interview with Wilson and examines six key works in depth.