Richard Wilson

by Michael Archer, Simon Morrissey, Harry Stocks

Richard Wilson is one of the foremost exponents of installation art working in the world today. His seminal work 20:50, a sea of reflective sump oil permanently installed in the Saatchi Collection, London, has been described as "one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century", and has come to stand as the defining example of installation. Recent pieces have continued to generate critical acclaim, including Slice of Reality, a 20-metre-high vertical cross-section of a 600-ton dredger located in the Thames at Greenwich, London, and Set North for Japan (74[degree] 33' 2"), a full-scale steel-framework replica of the artist's own house, displaced and inverted in the Japanese countryside.
This, the first monograph on the artist, examines the full spectrum of Wilson's work, moving from models, drawings and his many gallery-based projects to collaborations with architects and engineers to realize such major architectural interventions as Over Easy, an 8-metre, imperceptibly rotating, disc-shaped section of a building's facade that challenges our collective expectation and experience of how space and materials should behave. Richard Wilson has always been fascinated by displacements of the received order of our environment, from tunnelling to earthquakes, from oil wells to archaeology, and his work explores our responses to such radical disruption.

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2001