Gillian Wearing Lockdown exhibition view: Maureen Paley, London, 2020 © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London / Hove
Lockdown: a word that’s more familiar to most of us now than it was this time last year, and one that’s laden with personal and collective meaning. Taking the word as both title and subject, Gillian Wearing’s latest show at Maureen Paley, London is at once a deeply personal revelation of the artist’s creative response, and a wider, more complex meditation on self and the time in which we now live.
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The artworks ? a series of new self-portraits, a wax sculpture (Mask, Masked), and a video work (Your Views, 2013 ? present) ? are displayed in two rooms between which visitors? movements are choreographed by notices on the walls prescribing physical distancing. Lockdown Portrait 3, 2020 by Gillian Wearing, framed watercolour on paper, 39.5 x 31.5 x 2.6 cm © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London / Hove
Lockdown Portrait 5, 2020 by Gillian Wearing, framed watercolour on paper, 39.5 x 31.5 x 2.6 cm © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London / Hove
Wearing?s self-portraits, made in watercolour, are a product of the prolonged, enforced isolation brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. A departure from the photography and videography she is famous for, these small-scale paintings bespeak the self-reflection, both literally and figuratively, which Wearing?s lockdown precipitated. ?...