Mark Wallinger

38

Mark Wallinger : biography

1959 –

The largest work in the No Man’s Land show was Prometheus. This piece is in two parts – on the outside, in a dark corridor, is a video of Wallinger (or rather his alter-ego, "Blind Faith") sitting in an electric chair and singing Ariel’s song from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. From the corridor, automatic double doors give access to a brightly lit room which has an electric chair bolted to one of the walls, giving a top-down "God’s-eye view" of it. On two facing walls are large photos of fists with the words "LOVE" and "HATE" written on them, a reference to the preacher played by Robert Mitchum in the film, The Night of the Hunter, who had similar tattoos on his knuckles. A circular steel loop gives out a continuous buzzing sound.

Ecce Homo was the first work to occupy the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. This work is a life-sized statue of a Christ figure, naked apart from a loin cloth, and with his hands bound behind his back. He wears a crown of barbed wire. The sculpture was placed at the very front edge of the massive plinth, emphasising its vulnerability and relative smallness. It was quite popular with the public and was later shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001, where Wallinger was Britain’s representative.

He was one of the five artists shortlisted for the in January 2008, and in February 2009 it was announced that his design had won the competition. Wallinger’s design is of a giant white horse modelled on another of his own racehorses, ‘Riviera Red’, and has been described by his supporters as "an absolutely mesmerising conflation of old England and new, of the semi-mythical, past and the six-lanes, all-crawling present".Gayford, Martin. , Apollo (magazine), 2008-07-01. Retrieved on 2009-06-09.

He curated the exhibition "The Russian Linesman: Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds" at the Hayward Gallery in London, which lasted from February to May 2009.Baron, Scarlett. , Oxonian Review, 2009-03-09. Retrieved on 2010-12-29.

In April 2011, it was announced that Mark Wallinger would be one of three artists to collaborate with the Royal Ballet and the National Gallery to create a piece based on works by the Renaissance painter Titian.

In February 2013, it was announced that Wallinger had created a set of 270 enamel plaques of unicursal labyrinth designs, one for every London tube station, to mark the 150th anniversary of the London Underground; each will be numbered according to its position in the route taken by the contestants in the 2009 Guinness World Record Tube Challenge.

State Britain

State Britain was installed inside the Duveen Hall of Tate Britain in January 2007. It is a meticulous recreation of a 40 metre long display which had originally been situated around peace campaigner Brian Haw’s protest outside the Houses of Parliament against policies towards Iraq.Street, Ben Artnet Magazine, Feb. 8, 2007. The original display consisted of donations from the public, including paintings, banners and toys. This had been confiscated by the police under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Wallinger employed 15 people for 6 months and spent £90,000 to recreate it. He also put a black line on the floor of the Tate and through the middle of his exhibit to mark part of a 1 kilometre radius from Parliament.

Mark Wallinger had a large exhibition at museum De Pont the Netherlands in 2011. This was the first time that State Britain was exhibited in the Netherlands

In 2007, he won the Turner Prize for this work — this was his second Turner Prize nomination.