Tim Head
10 Mar - 17 Apr 2011
© Tim Head
Horizontal Lines 2, 2009
Permanent marker pen on 300gsm Snowdon heavyweight cartridge paper
100 × 140 cm, 110 × 149.5 cm framed
Horizontal Lines 2, 2009
Permanent marker pen on 300gsm Snowdon heavyweight cartridge paper
100 × 140 cm, 110 × 149.5 cm framed
TIM HEAD
10 March to 17 April 2011
Wilkinson Gallery is pleased to present Tim Head’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Over a career spanning the last forty years, Tim Head has worked in an eclectic range of media – including installation, photography, painting and most recently digital media – with an uncompromising commitment to exploring the individual’s experience of the surrounding world. Important museum exhibitions include exhibitions at the ICA, Kunstverein Freiburg, Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Serpentine Gallery and The Whitechapel Gallery. He has also represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery follows Head’s exhibition ‘Raw Material’, 2009-10, which travelled from Huddersfield Art Gallery to Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Head’s work might be characterised as a search for the visual representation of the tensions between the technological advancements of our material age and the individual’s experience of this modern world. Head’s work has always possessed an uncanny, if not Warholian, ability to engage with the visual language of mass communication, mass production and mass media. This has been seen by many as the enduring influence of Head’s university tutor, and British pop artist, Richard Hamilton. The artist’s most recent investigations with technology and digital media, advances this critical inquiry with the deconstruction of the material substance of the computer.
About a decade ago Head’s work entered upon an exploration of the digital age, most explicitly the computer itself. Exposing the codified layers of transcription that enable us to use these machines, the artist has begun to “move the medium away from a virtual space towards the same physical space that we ourselves occupy”. The three digital based works in the exhibition are powered by individually constructed computer programmes, each program has been codified to repeat a simple generic action. “Laughing Cavalier, 2002, is run by a program designed to select a colour at random from the millions of possible colours in the computer’s palette and to fill all the pixels on the screen with this colour. The program immediately selects another random colour to take its place on the screen and then repeats this operation continuously as fast as possible. Different horizontal bandings appear on the screen, these are directly due to the speed of the computer calculations in relation to the particular refresh rate of the screen (ie 60 times per second) and the screen’s inability to entirely fill itself with each colour before the next colour is sent”(Tim Head, 2010). The flickering screen, unable to satisfy its instruction, is an awkward presence; an infinite visual has been created and sits eerily in the gallery space. These screen-based works can be understood as an examination of the relationship between humankind and modernity and its mechanisms, posing serious questions about our increasing dependence upon technology, materiality and mass production at large. Head poses the unconsidered questions of the late machine age; if computer systems have become the universal means of communication, why are the majority of users completely unaware of the operational material of the medium itself? The artist’s systematic deconstruction of the computer, as an object of production, can be seen as a visualisation of the divide between what we perceive to be truth and truth itself. Whilst there are unavoidably dark, and often sinister, elements to these works, the exploration of colour and resultant imagery is effortlessly and strangely beautiful.
Tim Head’s ink drawings are an extension of the artist’s exploration of repetition and mechanised production, like the computer screens these drawings are seemingly anonymous. Though inevitably the drawings, unlike the unconscious quality of the computer screens, do reveal the nervous rhythms of their maker. Writer and cultural commentator, Michael Bracewell, discusses the “gothic industrialism and industrial cool” that these works evoke. There is something intensely affecting about these drawings’ ethereal quality and the labour involved in their production. “These drawings are not about representation but rather a focus on the inherent physical characteristics of the drawing medium; they are simply drawings rather than drawings of something” (Tim Head, 2010). Like the digital works, these drawings are the result of instruction rather that intention; the artist has programmed his mind to meticulously repeat a codified process of production. Head’s exploration of the digital age feels exceptionally lonely at points, seemingly an evocation of the loss of individual identity within the mass age, yet his art is ambiguous and there is an energy and excitement about these new media. Tim Head’s recent work possesses an ostensible respect for the austere purity of technology, but there is a pervading suspicion of the actual substance of the computer.
Tim Head studied at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and St Martins School of Art, London. Important museum exhibitions include Kettles yard (2010), Huddersfield Art Gallery (2009), Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany and touring (1995), Whitechapel Art Gallery (1992), ICA (1985), Serpentine Gallery (1979), Kettle’s Yard (1978), Whitechapel Art Gallery (1974) and Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1972). Tim Head represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with Nicolas Pope in 1980. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Days Like These’ Tate Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain, London (2003) and 7e Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon (2003-4)
10 March to 17 April 2011
Wilkinson Gallery is pleased to present Tim Head’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Over a career spanning the last forty years, Tim Head has worked in an eclectic range of media – including installation, photography, painting and most recently digital media – with an uncompromising commitment to exploring the individual’s experience of the surrounding world. Important museum exhibitions include exhibitions at the ICA, Kunstverein Freiburg, Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Serpentine Gallery and The Whitechapel Gallery. He has also represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery follows Head’s exhibition ‘Raw Material’, 2009-10, which travelled from Huddersfield Art Gallery to Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Head’s work might be characterised as a search for the visual representation of the tensions between the technological advancements of our material age and the individual’s experience of this modern world. Head’s work has always possessed an uncanny, if not Warholian, ability to engage with the visual language of mass communication, mass production and mass media. This has been seen by many as the enduring influence of Head’s university tutor, and British pop artist, Richard Hamilton. The artist’s most recent investigations with technology and digital media, advances this critical inquiry with the deconstruction of the material substance of the computer.
About a decade ago Head’s work entered upon an exploration of the digital age, most explicitly the computer itself. Exposing the codified layers of transcription that enable us to use these machines, the artist has begun to “move the medium away from a virtual space towards the same physical space that we ourselves occupy”. The three digital based works in the exhibition are powered by individually constructed computer programmes, each program has been codified to repeat a simple generic action. “Laughing Cavalier, 2002, is run by a program designed to select a colour at random from the millions of possible colours in the computer’s palette and to fill all the pixels on the screen with this colour. The program immediately selects another random colour to take its place on the screen and then repeats this operation continuously as fast as possible. Different horizontal bandings appear on the screen, these are directly due to the speed of the computer calculations in relation to the particular refresh rate of the screen (ie 60 times per second) and the screen’s inability to entirely fill itself with each colour before the next colour is sent”(Tim Head, 2010). The flickering screen, unable to satisfy its instruction, is an awkward presence; an infinite visual has been created and sits eerily in the gallery space. These screen-based works can be understood as an examination of the relationship between humankind and modernity and its mechanisms, posing serious questions about our increasing dependence upon technology, materiality and mass production at large. Head poses the unconsidered questions of the late machine age; if computer systems have become the universal means of communication, why are the majority of users completely unaware of the operational material of the medium itself? The artist’s systematic deconstruction of the computer, as an object of production, can be seen as a visualisation of the divide between what we perceive to be truth and truth itself. Whilst there are unavoidably dark, and often sinister, elements to these works, the exploration of colour and resultant imagery is effortlessly and strangely beautiful.
Tim Head’s ink drawings are an extension of the artist’s exploration of repetition and mechanised production, like the computer screens these drawings are seemingly anonymous. Though inevitably the drawings, unlike the unconscious quality of the computer screens, do reveal the nervous rhythms of their maker. Writer and cultural commentator, Michael Bracewell, discusses the “gothic industrialism and industrial cool” that these works evoke. There is something intensely affecting about these drawings’ ethereal quality and the labour involved in their production. “These drawings are not about representation but rather a focus on the inherent physical characteristics of the drawing medium; they are simply drawings rather than drawings of something” (Tim Head, 2010). Like the digital works, these drawings are the result of instruction rather that intention; the artist has programmed his mind to meticulously repeat a codified process of production. Head’s exploration of the digital age feels exceptionally lonely at points, seemingly an evocation of the loss of individual identity within the mass age, yet his art is ambiguous and there is an energy and excitement about these new media. Tim Head’s recent work possesses an ostensible respect for the austere purity of technology, but there is a pervading suspicion of the actual substance of the computer.
Tim Head studied at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and St Martins School of Art, London. Important museum exhibitions include Kettles yard (2010), Huddersfield Art Gallery (2009), Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany and touring (1995), Whitechapel Art Gallery (1992), ICA (1985), Serpentine Gallery (1979), Kettle’s Yard (1978), Whitechapel Art Gallery (1974) and Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1972). Tim Head represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with Nicolas Pope in 1980. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Days Like These’ Tate Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain, London (2003) and 7e Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon (2003-4)