Stephen Willats
30 Oct - 23 Dec 2010
On Friday, October 29, 2010, from 7 to 9 pm Galerie Thomas Schulte will open the exhibition “Street Diagram” by Stephen Willats, featuring a site-specific monumental wall drawing that incorporates film projections.
Stephen Willats, born in London in 1943, counts as one of the most influential contemporary English artists of his generation and has been frequently used as a reference point in the endeavors of following generations of artists. Acting as one of the few serious players in English conceptual art during the 1960’s and late 1970’s, his work has been acknowledged through numerous publications and solo exhibitions and can be found in various European museums today. Willats’ techniques range from drawing to photo-graphic documentation, to computer operated communi-cation devices and film.
Since the mid 1960’s Willats has been preoccupied by the notion of individual value systems and societal communi-cation and the possibility of making them transparent by means of art. He poses the question of an individual’s personal worth in society and how the individual perceives his personal lebensraum, how he defines it, and how he makes it liveable. His work revolves around life-realities in shape of interactive and personally organized systems and their effect on the concepts of life and the identity of the people in them. How do people communicate under the constraints and limitations that inflict these specific social conditions? How do they come to agreements despite differing value systems, parameters, and life-perspectives?
Willats’ large-scale wall drawings, which have been shown in various galleries and museums in recent years, combine drawing and video projections and go back to a specific, unprecedented diagrammatic method of drawing that Willats has been developing since 1962. To Willats, his drawings become an artistic parallel-activity and a means of a concentrated yet informal expression of his concept. In his Democratic Grids, Willats depicts social models as quasi window like cut-outs from an infinitely large structure, while the drawings of his Ideological Towers series play with the abstractions of architecture and modern para-phernalia as symbols of societal ambiance and individual self-identification. Both systems come together in his Wall Drawings as seen in Cybernetic Still Life No. 6 specifically conceived for Berlin and the gallery’s Corner Space.
Important solo exhibitions include the current exhibition Counterconsciousness at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, that concentrates on works on the post-punk, night life and wasteland scene of the 1980’s, Assumptions and Presumptions, Art on the Underground, London (2007), Stephen Willats Multiple Clothing: Message―Interaction―Exchange (1965-1998), Tate Modern, London (2006), How the world is and how it could be, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen (2006), Live in your Head, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2000), Buildings and People, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (1993), Living within Contained Relationships, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1978), and Concerning Our Present Way of Living, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1980). Willats has also been part of numerous group exhibitions, involving San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008), Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2007), FRAC Rhones-Alpes (1997) and FRAC Haute-Normandie (1996), as well as Biennales in Berlin, Paris, and Venice (1979, 1982, 2004). Willats lives and works in London and is the founder and editor of Control Magazine since 1962. From 1972 to 1973, he was director of the Centre of Behavioural Art, Gallery House in London, and from 1979 to 1980, he was the DAAD fellow artist in Berlin.
Stephen Willats, born in London in 1943, counts as one of the most influential contemporary English artists of his generation and has been frequently used as a reference point in the endeavors of following generations of artists. Acting as one of the few serious players in English conceptual art during the 1960’s and late 1970’s, his work has been acknowledged through numerous publications and solo exhibitions and can be found in various European museums today. Willats’ techniques range from drawing to photo-graphic documentation, to computer operated communi-cation devices and film.
Since the mid 1960’s Willats has been preoccupied by the notion of individual value systems and societal communi-cation and the possibility of making them transparent by means of art. He poses the question of an individual’s personal worth in society and how the individual perceives his personal lebensraum, how he defines it, and how he makes it liveable. His work revolves around life-realities in shape of interactive and personally organized systems and their effect on the concepts of life and the identity of the people in them. How do people communicate under the constraints and limitations that inflict these specific social conditions? How do they come to agreements despite differing value systems, parameters, and life-perspectives?
Willats’ large-scale wall drawings, which have been shown in various galleries and museums in recent years, combine drawing and video projections and go back to a specific, unprecedented diagrammatic method of drawing that Willats has been developing since 1962. To Willats, his drawings become an artistic parallel-activity and a means of a concentrated yet informal expression of his concept. In his Democratic Grids, Willats depicts social models as quasi window like cut-outs from an infinitely large structure, while the drawings of his Ideological Towers series play with the abstractions of architecture and modern para-phernalia as symbols of societal ambiance and individual self-identification. Both systems come together in his Wall Drawings as seen in Cybernetic Still Life No. 6 specifically conceived for Berlin and the gallery’s Corner Space.
Important solo exhibitions include the current exhibition Counterconsciousness at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, that concentrates on works on the post-punk, night life and wasteland scene of the 1980’s, Assumptions and Presumptions, Art on the Underground, London (2007), Stephen Willats Multiple Clothing: Message―Interaction―Exchange (1965-1998), Tate Modern, London (2006), How the world is and how it could be, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen (2006), Live in your Head, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2000), Buildings and People, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (1993), Living within Contained Relationships, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1978), and Concerning Our Present Way of Living, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1980). Willats has also been part of numerous group exhibitions, involving San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008), Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2007), FRAC Rhones-Alpes (1997) and FRAC Haute-Normandie (1996), as well as Biennales in Berlin, Paris, and Venice (1979, 1982, 2004). Willats lives and works in London and is the founder and editor of Control Magazine since 1962. From 1972 to 1973, he was director of the Centre of Behavioural Art, Gallery House in London, and from 1979 to 1980, he was the DAAD fellow artist in Berlin.