Page 62 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

to her latest paintings and sculptures, all of which explore
WORLD-CLASS ART Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks is organized by Jennifer
the performative nature of identity.

Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, and Nat Trotman,
Curator, Performance and Media, with X Zhu-Nowell,
Assistant Curator, and Ksenia Soboleva, Marica and Jan
GILLIAN WEARING:
WEARING MASKS Vilcek Curatorial Fellow. Gillian Wearing’s profoundly
empathetic and psychologically intense photographs,
Exhibition: Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks videos, sculptures, and paintings probe the tensions
Venue: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth between self and society in an increasingly media-
Avenue, New York, Tower Levels 2, 4, 5, 7 and New Media saturated world. Over her three-decade career, Wearing
Theater through April 4, and Tower Levels 2, 4 and 7 has focused equally on her own self-portraiture and on the
depictions of others, testing the boundaries between the
private and public, questioning fixed notions of identity,
FIRST NORTH AMERICAN RETROSPECTIVE OF GILLIAN and frequently anticipating the cultural transformations
WEARING FEATURES PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO, SCULPTURE, wrought by social media. Throughout her works, masks
AND PAINTINGS THAT EXPLORE PERFORMATIVE NATURE OF serve as both literal props and metaphors for the
IDENTITY IS EXTENDED performances each of us stage every day as individuals
From November 5, 2021 through June 13, 2022, the and as citizens.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Gillian Wearing: For her landmark piece Signs that say what you want them
Wearing Masks, the first retrospective of Wearing’s work in to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants
North America. Featuring more than a hundred pieces, the you to say (1992–93), Wearing photographed strangers
exhibition traces the development of the British conceptual holding placards with messages they wrote themselves.
artist’s practice from her earliest photographs and videos In so doing, she changed the terms of documentary

Installation view, Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks, Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2021

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