"UN", 2018
Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and carlier | gebauer, (c) Mark Wallinger
“The presence of UN anywhere tends to feel like a marker that something has gone wrong and come undone. Or what has been done cannot be undone, no matter how earnestly we would wish it to be so.”
mezzaterra11 – flat gallery is pleased to present a British artist, Mark Wallinger (b.1959), introducing a sociopolitical and critical text work, ‘UN’ (2018). Wallinger plays a pun between UN and UN- as a prefix. He found himself having started reading UN as UN- after he saw the United Nations initials, black and white, painted on oil-cans in the Green Line of Nicosia, Cyprus. He would say that the presence of UN anywhere tends to feel like a marker that something has gone wrong and come undone. Or what has been done cannot be undone, no matter how earnestly we would wish it to be so.
The exhibition of ‘UN’ at the time and place of now seems to be intended as a stake of individual consciousness in the current milieu of social and political regression. While many of Wallinger’s works have tackled current contentious issues, freely expressed through various forms and medium, the idea is still pertinent and intact today beyond its original time context. When dealing with topics as weighted as politics, religion or history, he consistently weaves in an element of humor. Wallinger’s continuously uncanny and ironic approach stimulates the viewer to reconsider the essence and character of surrounding world.
Mark Wallinger is one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists. His work Ecce Homo (1999) was the first piece to occupy the empty Fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and won the prestigious Turner prize in 2007 for his monumental installation State Britain. Currently exhibitions include MARK WALLINGER MARK at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy (2018). His works are in the collections of international museums including Tate, London, England; MoMA, New York; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.
