Mark Wallinger

Mark Wallinger (b. 1959) is one of the U.K.’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 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 realized 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.

Wallinger has created some of the most subtly intelligent and influential artworks of the last 30 years. Wallinger is known for his career-long engagement with ideas of power, authority, artifice and illusion. Using epic narratives, lyrical metaphors and ardent punning, the artist interleaves the mythological, the political and the everyday. A surprising, inventive and profound artist, whose astonishingly 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.