Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing’s work explores the connections between public and private, fiction and reality, and the relationship between artist and viewer.

This monograph provides an overview of the artist’s work from the early, iconic photographs of people holding up signs with written personal confessions or thoughts – entitled Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992–93) – to her latest video Bully (2010) in which the roles of victims and perpetrators, actors and directors are blurred

The publication accompanies a major international survey of the artist’s work at Whitechapel Gallery, London; K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; which includes new photographic works, two portraits from her ongoing series of iconic photographers and still lives of flowers that are inspired by the rich symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch painting.

100 full-colour illustrations and never-before-published archival material are accompanied by new texts by the exhibition’s curators, Daniel F. Herrmann, Doris Krystof and Bernhart Schwenk.