Cathy Wilkes

Combining the installation work for which she is perhaps best-known with a series of recent paintings and prints, this exhibition presents three complementary facets of Wilkes’s varied artistic practice. For over twenty-five years, the artist has been accumulating materials from everyday life and incorporating them within an on-going and open-ended series of installations. Yet the seeming randomness of the installations belies a precision born of a long and intense creative process, one that often spans months or years.

What sets Cathy Wilkes’s subtle narratives apart, as well as their introspection, is their strong allegorical undertow. Her objects, figures, actions or images show us places of loss and transformation. Within this activity, contemplation, actions and processes slowly move between conscious thought and a private mystical theophany.

Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966, Belfast) lives and works in Glasgow. She represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and participated in the International Exhibition of the Biennale in 2013. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2008 and was awarded the inaugural Maria Lassnig Prize in 2017. Wilkes’s work was recently the subject of a touring exhibition that began at Tate Liverpool (2015) and travelled to LENTOS Kunstmuseum, Linz and the Museum Abteiberg, Moenchengladbach (2015–2016). Other solo exhibitions include MoMA PS1, New York (fall 2017); Tramway, Glasgow (2014) and The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2012).