Mark Wallinger

Working across a range of media, including sculpture, video, photography, performance, printmaking and painting, Mark Wallinger creates work that explores power, authority, reality and illusion. From social issues of class and nationalism to Einstein’s theory of relativity, Wallinger’s practice intertwines politics and the everyday in both nuanced and visible ways. For example, his installation State Britain, which won Turner Prize in 2007, was an exact copy of peace protester Brian Haw’s protest-camp in Parliament Square. Wallinger’s sculpture of Christ titled Ecce Homo (1999) was the first to occupy the fourth plinth in Trafalgar square. Exploring ideas around ‘Britishnenness’, the artist exposes power sculptures entrenched in the country’s social, political and economic fabrics. More recently, Wallinger has been creating large-scale action paintings with marks made by his own body, referencing both Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ and the imagery of the Rorschach test, exploring the idea of the self and its imprints.