Gillian Wearing

The Kunstsammlung NRW was hosting Germany’s first solo exhibition of Gillian Wearing’s broad spectrum of artistic works. Wearing, a member of the Young British Artists and winner of the Turner Prize in 1997, is known for her media-critical works which delve into the human soul and explore collective traumas and the problematic aspects of social conventions.
Wearing often integrates cinematic and photographic forms into her investigative works. In her video portrayals, in which selected individuals talk about their intimate feelings in front of the camera, she offered social observations long before comparable formats made their debut on television. As a fine artist, she prefers working with textual material, translating, for example, statistical and psychotherapeutic processes into a pictorial language.
The exhibition has been developed in cooperation with the Whitechapel Gallery in London. It featured an installation-based course through which visitors could experience the artistic congruency of her works. The organizers also wished to preserve the linguistic form of her works, which entailed presenting them in translation via headphones, hand-outs and surtitles. The accompanying publication, the first comprehensive monograph on Wearing in German, provides an extensive documentation of her works and places them in a contextual relationship.

Artistic director: Doris Krystof; Artist: Gillian Wearing (GB)

Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung North Rhine-Westphalia, 8 Sept. 2012 - 6 Jan. 2013
London, Whitechapel Gallery, 27 Mar. - 16 Jun. 2012