Richard Wentworth

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Richard Wentworth's Siege (1983–1984) at the Tate Gallery

Richard Wentworth (* 1947 ) is a British artist, curator and university lecturer.

life and work

Wentworth was born in 1947 in the then New Zealand province of Samoa. From 1965 he studied at the Hornsey College of Art in London, then at the Royal College of Art, where Bill Woodrow and Tony Cragg were also studying at that time . In 1967 he worked with Henry Moore . Since the late 1970s he became internationally known as an important representative of the so-called New British Sculpture movement.

Wentworth was Professor at Goldsmiths College in London from 1971 to 1987 and Professor at the Royal College of Art from 2009 to 2011 . From 2002 to 2010 he also taught at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, which is located at Oxford University. Many of his students, such as Damien Hirst , became known worldwide under the term of the Young British Artists . His works found international recognition because they fundamentally changed the definitions of sculpture and photography that had been in use until then.

The way in which the everyday life of people and society becomes art-worthy in his work became influential. For example, he captures sculptural forms in the everyday world with the camera and also makes use of objects that he found on the street. The symbolic-metaphorical properties of the objects represented overlap with the practical ones.

In his series “Making Do and Getting By”, which he began in the mid-1990s, he assumes that “in a globally networked and accessible world, the place in front of one's own door is possibly the most exotic space of all”. He therefore documents the everyday, pays attention to otherwise neglected objects and their involuntary as well as random geometric structures in public space and also depicts uncanny situations in his works that would otherwise go unnoticed. By converting industrial objects or found objects into art, he undermines their original function and expands the modes of perception of these objects by breaking up conventional classification systems - for example, very vividly in a series of objects in which he refers to the objects to which a dictionary is referring , stuff into the respective dictionary. An example from this series is the work "Tract (from Boost to Wham)" from 1993.

These works explore the question of what happens to things when they no longer fulfill the function behind their naming and often revolve around our concepts and ideas of objects and their use as part of our everyday experience. In Germany, for example, Wentworth showed plates as part of this artistic concept, which he first smashed and then reassembled in order to examine whether the resulting object would turn out to be a plate or something third, unknown, nameless. His work is therefore very close to semiotics . For Wentworth, every attempt to restore order will produce a disorder which in turn brings itself back into a state of an uncertain new order. He is particularly interested in the creeping transition between different forms of communication and the fundamental ambivalence of attempts at systematization. His “Tellerparade auf dem Boden” (the German title of the work), which he showed in four different German exhibition venues, is in this sense an illuminating study of the neglected aspects of our consumer culture.

According to his own statement, Wentworth is interested in the cultural phenomenon of mentality in his work, which for him includes the questions of how we see what we see, what we do with what we see, how we name, what we believe, to have seen who we can share this with and who is talking to whom.

His artistic strategy of discovering things differently and, above all, of looking where others look the other way, dealing with the remote, the unseen and the overlooked and perceiving minimal (meaning) shifts in the apparently familiar, shaped the style of many artists of the following generation. Here his work is linked to sociological, aesthetic and communication-theoretical issues, such as how people construct realities, and have similarities in terms of content with some of the works by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman that were sometimes created at the same time . In his work he assumes that the simple things that we encounter every day are in fact very complex. Because of this artistic approach, he sees the streets of London as his studio. How a suburban street is organized and disorganized is an exemplary opportunity for the artist to observe cultural fluctuations and to study the habits and the interaction between the public and the private. He addresses the unconscious display in our everyday world. For the artist, whoever puts a Christmas tree in the garbage can inadvertently makes a cultural statement, and Wentworth deals with the gradual transition to more obvious acts of communication such as signs. This gives his work an impression of what constitutes a social place and what does not.

As a curator , he took a similar approach in 2013 by asking the public to bring what they had collected as works of art to the Whitworth Museum for one night. There was no restriction or selection and a discussion in the museum about what can be considered art today could unfold freely.

Honors

Wentworth was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2011 for his services to British art .

Exhibitions (selection)

  • Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, USA, (2016)
  • Bold Tendencies, Peckham, London, England (2015)
  • Kings Cross at Central St. Martins College, London, England (2013)
  • Museu da Farmacia, Experimenta Design, Lisbon, Portugal (2011)
  • Whitechapel Gallery, London, England (2010)
  • 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2009)
  • Lisson Gallery, London, England (2009)
  • Pharos Center for Contemporary Art, Nicosia, Cyprus (2006)
  • Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England (2005)
  • 50th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2003)
  • Artangel, London, England (2002)
  • Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle, Calais, France (2001)
  • Galerie Margaret Biedermann, Munich, Germany (2000)
  • Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (1998)
  • Municipal Gallery Göppingen, Germany (1998)
  • Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland (1994)
  • Serpentine Gallery, London, England (1993)

literature

  • Stephan Berg, Ulrike Prasch, Richard Wentworth: Richard Wentworth. London, Freiburg, Göppingen, Bonn . Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nuremberg 1997, ISBN 978-3-928342-87-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Marina Warner: Richard Wentworth. Thames and Hudson, London, 1993, ISBN 0-500-27743-5 , p. 116.
  2. ↑ See also http://www.lissongallery.com/artists/richard-wentworth
  3. ↑ See http://www.peterfreemaninc.com/artists/richard-wentworth/bio/
  4. ↑ See Stephan Berg, Ulrike Prasch, Richard Wentworth: Richard Wentworth. London, Freiburg, Göppingen, Bonn. Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nuremberg, 1997, ISBN 3-928342-87-8 , p. 84.
  5. ↑ See http://www.lissongallery.com/artists/richard-wentworth
  6. ↑ See Thomas Tabbert: Parade of plates on the floor - art out of the gutter: objects and photos by Richard Wentworth . In: Südwestpresse, February 13, 1998
  7. ↑ Quoted in Berg et al., P. 15.
  8. ↑ See http://www.lissongallery.com/artists/richard-wentworth
  9. ↑ See http://www.lissongallery.com/artists/richard-wentworth
  10. ↑ See Berg et al., P. 48.
  11. ↑ See Berg et al., P. 46.
  12. ↑ See http://www.lissongallery.com/artists/richard-wentworth
  13. ↑ See Berg et al., P. 45.
  14. ↑ See Berg et al., P. 45.
  15. ↑ See Berg et al., P. 25.
  16. ↑ See Tabbert 1998
  17. ↑ In the English original the quote is: "At the foot of what I'm interested in is mentality: how we see what we see, what we do with what we see, how we nominate what we think we have seen, who we can share it with and who is speaking to whom. "Quoted from Richard Wentworth: Making Do and Getting By . Koenig Books, London, 2015, p. 11. ISBN 978-3-86-335-843-3
  18. ↑ See Berg et al., P. 66 and Linda Saunders (Ed.): Richard Wentworth . Tate Publishing, Liverpool, 2005, p. 22. ISBN 1-85437-574-1
  19. ↑ See Saunders 2005, p. 7.
  20. ↑ See Saunders 2005, p. 27.
  21. ↑ See http://events.manchester.ac.uk/event/event:x24-hg570gwt-omrgnl/lost-and-found-museums-at-night
  22. ↑ See https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/59647/supplement/8
personal data
SURNAME Wentworth, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British artist, curator and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Samoa