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Gillian Wearing

Since the beginning of her career, Gillian Wearing has drawn from techniques of theatre, reality television, and fly-on-the-wall documentary-making to construct narratives that explore personal fantasies and confessions, individual traumas, cultural histories, and the role of the media. Anonymity through elaborate masks, costumes and role-play has remained a critical part of Wearing’s practice and influential investigation of the ways in which individuals present themselves to others when the self is temporarily concealed.


Her work has also been shown at the Museum of Modern Art & MoMA PS1 in New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre in London, Kunsthaus Zurich in Switzerland, National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, New Museum in New York, George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY, and at the Hessel Museum at Bard College in New York. An important member of the Young British Artists, Wearing was awarded the Turner Prize in 1997.


Courtesy of Plinth 

Born 1963
Hometown Birmingham, United Kingdom
Lives and Works London, England
Permanent Collection

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Tate Britain, London

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Contemporary Art Society, London

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.

Guggenheim Museum, New York

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN

Articles

An Interview with Gillian Wearing
An Interview with Gillian Wearing

In this excerpt from Phaidon's Gillian Wearing monograph, the artist discusses finding out "what makes people tick."

Mark Bradford Does Standup & More
Mark Bradford Does Standup & More

Here are a handful of stories worth spending some time this weekend delving into, gathered from across the web.

10 Exhibitions That Changed Contemporary Art
10 Exhibitions That Changed Contemporary Art

From the groundbreaking "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum (now being reinterpreted in a new show) to "WACK!" at L.A. MOCA in 2007, here's a survey of exhibitions that upended the way we look at art today—and how artists make it, too.

The Scandalous History of the Turner Prize
The Scandalous History of the Turner Prize

We look back on the legacy of the annual British art award, which has launched stars and celebrated underdogs, but always causes a uproar.

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